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Title: Resurrection, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 2/13
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony. Really, really, Steve/Tony -- ignore the fact that it will take three chapters to get there. Also, various canon ships, including Peter/MJ and Luke/Jessica/Danny. Sharon/Winter Soldier, for your daily dosage of bondage kink.
Warnings: Denial fic. Blatant shipper fic. One non-canonical het pairing in later chapters. A dire lack of porn. Terrifying amounts of snuggling and angst in later chapters.
Summary: Doom brings Steve back from the dead. Hijinks ensue, some of which might vaugely be considered plot. Surprisingly, this isn't actually crack-fic -- it's just Marvel.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Chapter One
Note: This fic will be thirteen chapters long, posted twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. For a rundown of where this fic departs from current continuity, go (here). Familiarity with the events of Civil War is encouraged, and you pretty much have to have read Civil War: The Confession.
Thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
harmonyangel and tavella for the wonderful beta job.
Chapter Two:
*Tony, if you need me to --*
*No,* he interrupted, *stay there, Carol. The response teams have the DC incident under control.*
*Nice to know somebody’s got something under control.* Carol snapped. Tony could hear shouting in the background, distorted and made unintelligible by static -- Carol’s powers might no longer be Binary-level, but they still weren’t kind to headsets. *And I wasn't talking about DC. Are you all --*
***Violence rises in Los Angeles this morning, as tensions run high in the wake of yesterday’s bombing…***
"Mr. Stark, this crime scene is under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; you can’t just bring in SHIELD and sweep it all under the--"
***Emergency workers are still trying to recover the bodies of an unknown number of victims killed when a Los Angeles apartment block…***
"Mr. Stark, the fire and rescue guys need to know if --"
***Federal law enforcement agencies released a statement this morning confirming that the explosive device located and dismantled on the Mall yesterday did in fact contain anthrax…***
Nothing new. Just the same recycled broadcasts that had been playing since eight this morning. Tony cut the data feeds from CNN and turned his attention back to Carol. *You and Ares do what you can. Sentry should get there soon.* He opened the feed to Bob’s headset. *Sentry. ETA?*
*An hour, maybe? I could try to fly faster, but I think --*
*Just do the best you can.* Tony cut Bob off and returned to Carol again. *Sentry estimates his ETA at an hour. You and Ares keep the crowd under control until he gets there.*
"Mr. Stark, are you even listening to --"
"Yes," Tony said shortly. "That column is load-bearing. Do I look like the kind of man who sticks ornamental columns in my office buildings?" It should have been obvious from the support column's location alone that it was a redundancy feature, designed to hold part of the weight of the second floor balcony in case the floor beams were overloaded beyond their capacity. "Agent Gilbert," he made an attempt to bring his tone back to something that approximated calm and moderate, "I appreciate your concern, but SHIELD’s anti-terrorism division is handling this case. We’ll send you a report when we’re finished."
***... the Premier was attacked early this morning... he has been hospitalized with minor injuries...***
Tony rubbed at his forehead, his hand coming away covered in ash and the grey dust of pulverized concrete. The world was almost as much of complete and utter mess as Stark Tower, and he had no idea where to even start trying to fix it.
With the superhero community so distracted and divided for the past few months, there had been a major spike in day-to-day, street level crime and gang violence as criminals took advantage of the situation. And now Doctor Doom and the Red Skull were also taking advantage of the chaos.
Doom had been sending waves of minions to attack New York City, for reasons Tony had yet to figure out. Reed Richards was still on vacation with Sue, and Doom usually timed his various world-domination attempts to make certain that Reed would be caught in the middle of them. This time, however, he had apparently found something even more entertaining than his old vendetta.
Of course, they could never prove that the attackers were Doom' s men satisfactorily enough to actually do anything about it. That would have been too easy. Instead, the bastard sat in the Latverian Embassy flaunting his diplomatic immunity and laughing at them through his metal mask.
They were just as certain who was behind the recent rise in terrorist activity, but the problem there was less proving that it was Red Skull, and more actually finding him. When he wanted to, Red Skull could hide himself like a maggot on a carcass.
First, there had been the bomb in Times Square two weeks ago. Nearly twenty people had been killed or injured, and there had been considerable structural damage done to the surrounding buildings. Thankfully, there had been no biological or radioactive component to the bomb, which would have made the death toll infinitely higher.
There had been a biological component to the bomb that they had dismantled on the Mall yesterday; it had been loaded with enough anthrax spores to infect several hundred people at least.
But the Mall was far too open an area for biological agents to be properly effective; Tony should have known that it was a distraction before half the apartment blocks in LA started blowing up.
***Fires continue to burn unabated in bombed sections of Los Angeles...***
The bombs had been centered in poor, largely Hispanic neighborhoods, which had complicated matters for any variety of reasons. For one thing, the high number of immigrants in those neighborhoods meant that many of the residents spoke little or no English. And since many of them were there illegally, they tended to be scared of authority figures, and a number of people had hidden from the SHIELD agents and superheroes who were trying to rescue them.
They couldn't even be sure whether they had actually managed to get everyone out, since so many of the buildings were over-crowded, filled with people that didn't show up on any tenant rolls.
And then, this morning, a suicide bomber had succeeded in blowing up Stark Tower’s lobby.
"Mr. Stark, I know this is your building, and that you're Director of SHIELD, but you've got to understand, my men are just trying to do their jobs, and that would be a lot easier if you'd just answer a few questions --"
*Jen, you speak Spanish, right?* Tony ignored the agent, turning his attention to She-Hulk.
*Some. Why?*
*All right, then I want you to head out to LA as soon as possible; SHIELD can handle things here, but we could use another visible hero out there, especially one who can speak Spanish.*
"Sir," and that was Jarvis; he actually deserved some attention. "What would you like me to do with this?" He was holding a small picture frame. The lobby had been filled with a number of paintings, largely chosen by Jarvis. Most of them had been destroyed in the blast, and Tony thought that Jarvis was almost more upset by that than anything else.
***Yet another Synagogue was desecrated in Paris... religious violence threatens to break out if these attacks continue...***
"Let me see," Tony said, gesturing at the frame. Jarvis handed it to him, and Tony took it, half an eye on the picture, half on the repairs going on across the room.
***According to Reverend Phelps, the recent attacks are a sign from above, a sign from God that we should have taken the decimation of the mutant population more seriously, that we should have seen that God wants us to eradicate these unnatural aberrations.... Reverend Phelps, a few words?***
"Agent Gilbert, tell your men to stay below the fourth floor; all of the structural damage is on the third and below. They’re already interfering enough with SHIELD’s attempts to handle this terrorist action, they don’t need to interfere with business as well," Tony said, glancing down at the picture Jarvis had handed him.
He nearly dropped it, and only managed not to because Agent Gilbert was still standing next to him, looking impatient, and the room was filled with SHIELD agents he was technically in charge of.
It was a pen and ink sketch, a slightly cartoony picture of the original Avengers, with Jan out in front at Wasp-size, posed like a pin-up model.
"I really don’t care what you do with this," he said, handing the picture back to Jarvis hurriedly. "Get rid of it, it’s singed anyway."
***A fifteen year old girl with dyed-green hair was found beaten today, outside of Lansing, Kansas... this is the seventh such incident in the past two days... boy with a club foot, and a man with a harelip were severely injured in an incidence of mob violence yesterday...***
The series of lynchings in the Bible Belt weren’t exactly unexpected, but they were certainly unwelcome. They were also completely outside of SHIELD’s jurisdiction, which meant that there wasn’t much Tony could do about them at the moment.
"Sir?" And that was Agent Brickner, one of SHIELD’s twenty-three-year-old recruits, and every inch Nick Fury’s man.
"Just a moment, Brickner," Tony said, holding up a hand. He was still scanning through the various newscasts, trying to keep as up to date on the world-wide situation as possible.
*Carol, if you have a chance, get someone to fly through the mid-west. It seems like they could use a show of force.*
*They’re frightened civilians, Tony.* Carol sounded stressed and exhausted. Tony could sympathize; he had been in LA yesterday, until the attack on Stark Tower had called him back to New York.
Thank God Pepper was still visiting her mother; Tony couldn’t begin to imagine what he would do if something happened to her right now.
*They may be frightened, but that’s no excuse for attacking people for having poor fashion sense.*
"Sir? We just got a report that Agent Dugan said you needed to hear about --"
Tony closed his eyes, running a hand through his hair. "Yes, Agent Brickner?"
There’s been a massacre at the An Hu Po State Psychiatric Facility. All the guards and prisoners were found dead yesterday morning, and there are signs that one or more of the prisoners may have escaped. No one knows what happened, but China’s considering it a possible terrorist threat, and Agent Dugan wants to know if we’re taking action."
Just what they needed. SHIELD was spread thin enough as it was; sending agents to China would probably mean pulling people out of LA.
*Bob? How close are you to Los Angeles?* If they could get most of the Avengers helping in LA, more SHIELD agents could be sent elsewhere; they weren’t really trained for Search and Rescue anyway.
*About forty-five minutes, I think? I can try to hurry if you need --*
*Don’t push yourself, Bob. We’ll need you on your feet when you reach LA.*
"The Chinese Premier was attacked this morning; I think we’re going to have to treat it as a terrorist act," Tony told Brickner. "Tell Dugan to tell them that we’ll send agents as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir," Agent Brickner said, saluting, and hurrying off, presumably to contact Dugan somewhere quieter.
There was a loud thud from across the room, as a piece of concrete hit the lobby’s marble floor. "Would you tell your men to watch it? That’s the third time they’ve dropped rubble in the course of their supposed investigation," Tony snapped, turning to Gilbert, who was still hovering. He had thought he was too burned out to feel anything anymore, but it turned out that incompetence could still irritate him. "At the moment, the structural damage is comparatively minimal, and I’d like to keep it that way. There’s really no reason..."
***Signs of unrest continue to mount in China as Temugin, son of the infamous supervillain, the Mandarin, was found dead today...***
Temugin had had the Mandarin's rings. Tony could have bet money that they weren't on his fingers anymore, but there wasn't a Casino in Vegas that would take those odds.
The fact that he was feeling nothing but a sort of dull shock probably wasn’t a good thing, but it was all that Tony had the energy left for at the moment.
Because put together with what Agent Brickner had just told him, things had just gotten infinitely worse.
* * *
After the initial round of embarrassing hugging was over, Steve was allowed to sit down and finish his cereal, while everyone else fell all over themselves attempting to fill him in on the rest of what had happened while he was... gone.
It still felt odd to think of himself as having been dead. Better to avoid thinking about what had happened at the courthouse and afterwards and concentrate only on what had to be done now.
Technically, he was supposed to be on trial or in jail, but he didn't even know if the charges against him were still in effect. They said he'd been buried with military honors, which meant something, but he wasn't sure what. Possibly only that Tony had felt guilty.
Registration was really, truly in effect now; according to Luke, most of the superhero community had signed up, and only the New Avengers and a few other groups -- criminals like the Punisher and Moon Knight, those runaway kids from California, and the Young Avengers, who had apparently fallen off the map -- remained outside the system. America had itself a superhuman army now, and Steve wasn't sure he wanted to know how they were going to use it.
Matt Murdock had returned from wherever he had disappeared to and was putting the fear of God -- or, more accurately, the fear of the devil -- into the denizens of Hell's Kitchen. He was still unregistered as well, had even somehow managed to get the charges against him dropped and his license to practice law re-instated.
In retrospect, the witch trial the public and the FBI had put Daredevil through had been the beginning of the end, the first sign of just how much the American people had lost faith in superheroes. Or maybe it had begun before that. Maybe Hector Ayala's trial had been the first sign.
The Fantastic Four had registered, and Sue and Reed had apparently patched their marriage back together. No one was sure what the X-Men were doing, which was possibly the one thing in the whole scenario that hadn't changed from the old days.
Nick Fury was still underground, and no one had seen Sam or Sharon since they'd tried to break Steve out of SHIELD custody. That worried Steve even more than Tony's superhero army.
"She vanished from the hospital," Jessica Drew had said, shrugging. "I don't know where or how. I don't have any contacts in SHIELD any more, or even in Hydra. I think maybe Stark's people got to her."
"They're 'getting' to people now?"
"They got Arachne," she said. "She has a position in Canada now, on one of their pet superhero teams, and never mind that Ms. Marvel and Wonderman dragged her screaming out of her house and away from her kid to throw her in the negative zone. They even got to Ben Urich; he's back on staff at the Bugle and hasn't published a word opposing registration since you died." She had stared down at her hands for a moment, then looked back up at Steve. "They got you."
"That wasn't Tony's people," Steve had protested. "It was a sniper."
Jessica had smiled a cynical little smile and let the subject drop.
Steve hadn't pushed it. Arguing the point would mean reliving those memories of being shot, and dwelling on them would serve no purpose.
He had asked about clothing instead, pointing out that he couldn't go barefoot and wear Luke's spare work-out clothes indefinitely, and MJ had disappeared upstairs and returned with one of his old costumes. The reinforced tunic had been ripped and clumsily repaired, the boots were scuffed, and one of the wings on the mask was bent.
"Peter and I found it while we were clearing out the safe-house, and we didn't know what to do with it. So I just stuck it in a box. I mean, I couldn't just throw it away..." she let the sentence trail off, and held the boots out to him like an offering.
"Thank you," Steve had said, not entirely sure which he was thanking her for. He had taken the boots, and gone to get dressed.
Now, once again wearing familiar blue, red, and white, mask back in place, Steve decided that it was good to be back in the costume, even if the tears had been sewn up with thread that didn't match, the crooked black stitches standing out visibly against the blue leather. He stared at himself in Strange's bathroom mirror -- a full-length stand mirror, its frame matching the golden claw-feet of the freestanding bathtub -- and made an attempt to pull the bent wing on his cowl straight again. As soon as he let go, it returned to its previous position.
It was still in better shape than the costume he had been wearing... before.
As always, once back in costume, he felt naked without his shield. No one seemed to know exactly where it was, but the general consensus seemed to be that SHIELD most likely still had it.
"Probably planning to hand it off to some obedient little lap dog who jumps when they call," Luke had said, snorting.
The thought of someone else using his shield made Steve's stomach twist a little, it had been with him for so long, and was so much a part of him.
Even now, though, even after everything that had happened, Steve had a hard time seeing Tony just giving his shield to someone else; he knew, probably better than anyone else, how Steve felt about it.
But maybe, after everything that had happened, Steve didn't know Tony as well as he had thought anymore. Maybe he would just pass the shield on to someone else; it would certainly make a good show for the press, if nothing else.
One more thing to be dealt with. One more problem to solve. It was a minor issue compared with the arrest warrants hanging over the New Avengers' heads, but the absence of weight across his back where the shield was supposed to hang made him feel even more off balance.
Steve gave up attempting to fix the bent wing, turning away from the mirror -- and dropped into a crouch, reaching automatically for the shield that wasn't there, as Dr. Strange's voice emerged from the smooth glass surface.
"Everyone assemble in my study. The perimeter alarms have been tripped."
Steve made it to the study in under a minute, but was still nearly the last to arrive, ducking into the room just as Peter, also in costume, dropped down from the hallway ceiling like a shadow. When had Spiderman returned to wearing black?
"I took the precaution of setting up surveillance spells around the outside of the building," Strange said. He waved a hand at a small mirror on the far wall, and the reflection rippled and shifted until it showed a crystal clear view of the front of the building, currently a mess of construction debris walled off behind a chain-link fence. A man in a black motorcycle jacket and a woman with a blonde ponytail were standing in front of the fence, staring at the water-stained sign that proclaimed, "Starbucks! Coming soon!"
"Let them in." The words were out of his mouth before he thought about them; even from the back, he recognized them both instantly. "It's Sharon and Bucky."
"I don't know." Luke was shaking his head, arms folded across his chest. "We bring them in, our secret hideout won't be so secret anymore."
"Let them in," Steve repeated. "They're Fury's people." And I need to see them, he added silently. Sharon had been with him when he died; she most of all had the right to know that he was back.
"They were Fury's people," Peter pointed out from his spot halfway up the wall. "We've got no idea what they've been doing for the past six weeks. And Agent Carter works for SHIELD."
"Let them in."
"I say we risk it." Rand shrugged, and pulled his yellow mask out of the pocket of his jeans. "We have to trust somebody, sometime, and there are two of them and seven of us." He started tying the mask on; it should have looked incongruous combined with civilian clothing, but somehow didn't.
Strange spoke a word in a language Steve didn't recognize, and there was a flare of pink smoke in the center of the room. When it cleared, Sharon and Bucky were standing there, right on top of the patch of floor Steve had woken up on.
They both had their guns out, and Iron Fist and Spiderman were already moving. A spray of webbing ripped Sharon's weapon away from her before she could finish raising it, and Iron Fist launched himself at Bucky in a flying kick, right foot knocking the gun out of his hand. Bucky sidestepped, pivoting and extending his left hand in a move that Steve had taught him himself, years ago -- one that, if the blow connected, would put his steel fingers right through Iron Fist's ribs.
"Bucky!" Steve barked, pitching his voice to the same drill-sergeant tone he'd used during the war, "Stand down."
It was too late for Bucky to pull the blow completely, but he still managed to check himself enough that the strike that should have shattered Iron Fist's ribs did little more than knock him off balance.
Rand hit the floor on his shoulder, rolled to his feet, and stood with one fist raised and ready to strike, a golden corona glowing around it. "You're good. Want to try that again?"
Bucky ignored him. He was staring at Steve, his face completely empty of emotion. Beside him, Sharon had let her empty hands fall to her sides. She ought to have been happy, but the expression on her face, dead-pale, and wide eyed, looked much closer to horror.
"Are you two all right?" Steve asked. Suddenly it was very, very important that he know.
"Am I --" Sharon's voice sounded choked. She took a step forward, and Bucky grabbed her by the arm, pulling her up short.
"We don't know who that is." He turned to Steve, face still expressionless, and said, "Prove you're him."
Steve cocked his head to one side, thinking for a moment, trying to select some bit of information from their shared past that no one else in this time period would know. "Remember April 29th, 1945?" He paused, just long enough for Bucky to nod, then added, "I threw up, you didn’t." Even after sixty years, it was still one of the most horrible things Steve had ever seen. Bucky was the only one who had been there to witness his reaction, and neither of them had ever spoken of it afterwards, even to one another.
Bucky continued to stare at him for a long moment, before nodding, stance relaxing almost imperceptibly. "It’s him," he said, not taking his eyes off of Steve. He let go of Sharon’s arm, and crossed the room to stand in front of Steve, holding out his right hand. Steve took it, and they clasped hands for a long moment, leaning toward one another until their shoulders brushed. "It’s good to have you back," Bucky said, smiling slightly.
At that, Sharon, who had been watching them with a frozen look, made a quiet keening noise. "Sharon?" Steve asked, letting go of Bucky’s hand to move towards her.
She shook her head, eyes welling with tears. "I -- oh, God," she said in a small voice. Then she turned, raising one hand to her eyes, and left the room quickly.
There was a moment of frozen silence, as everyone stared at the empty doorway. Then MJ rolled her eyes, said, "Oh, for goodness sakes," and followed Sharon out of the room.
"I thought she'd be happy." It was ridiculous to feel hurt. Of course Sharon would want privacy for a few minutes; she'd never been comfortable shedding tears in public. It was too close to a display of weakness.
Bucky glanced at the doorway, eyes avoiding Steve's for a second. "She thinks it was her fault."
"She had nothing to do with it." Everyone seemed to think they knew more about his death than he did, Steve reflected. "There was a sniper in one of the buildings; I saw the dot from his laser scope." There was nothing Sharon could have done, save for throwing herself bodily between him and the bullets, and he was selfishly glad she hadn't done that; living at the expense of a friend's life wouldn't have been worth it.
Bucky nodded. "Crossbones. We killed him for you." He said it matter-of-factly, the way Steve might announce that he'd fought or captured a minor supervillain. It was hard, sometimes, to see the enthusiastic kid he'd met in '42 in this new, adult Bucky. "I tried to get information on Red Skull from him, but he wouldn't talk."
"Um, yeah, about Red Skull, actually, about supervillains in general..." That was Peter, still crouched halfway up the wall. "Why are you here? Not that this isn't a great reunion and everything, and not that we aren't loving the cryptic code conversation, but --"
"Nick Fury sent us," Bucky said, cutting Peter off. "We got wind that Red Skull and Doctor Doom had formed an alliance. They were seen meeting in a warehouse two nights ago; our operative couldn’t see what they were doing, but there’s no way it was good. Nick thought that as long as you weren’t fighting each other anymore, at least one of the groups of superheroes ought to know about the situation." From the way he said it, Steve suspected that Nick had had a great deal more to say about the situation than that, and rather more bluntly.
"Actually," Doctor Strange said, stepping forward, "they were performing a resurrection ritual. Now, although I’m certain that they had nothing but the worst of intentions, due to a timely intervention, I believe that we can agree that things have turned out well."
Bucky didn’t quite twitch. "Red Skull and Doctor Doom brought you back?" he asked.
"I’m trying not to think about it," Steve told him.
"Why come to us?" Jessica asked. "Why not go to SHIELD and let their pet initiative teams take care of it?"
"Because they're compromised, " Bucky said. "Red Skull had agents inside the organization. Sharon's psychologist was one of them, and so was one of the crowd control agents at Cap's arraignment. He did a lot more talking than Crossbones."
Did Nick know that his current subordinates were torturing his former subordinates for information? Uneasily, Steve concluded that he probably did. He wasn't anywhere near as omniscient as he liked to pretend, but Nick was still a consummate judge of people, and had never minded getting his hands dirty.
For a moment, Steve wondered which of the guards it had been. The one who had muttered about "costumed hotshots" when he unlocked Steve's cell? The kid who kept forgetting himself and calling Steve "sir"? The one who had been in front of him on the steps, whom he'd tried to save from the sniper's bullet?
There was a reason he had always preferred a straight-forward fight to intelligence work, and it wasn't simply because beating up Hydra agents was less complicated.
"What did this agent have to say?" Strange had his "impassive sorcerer" face on once again, and managed to give the impression that he already knew the answer and was merely asking out of politeness.
"Nothing useful; he wasn't important enough for that." Bucky smirked ever-so-slightly. "Just that he'd been told to look the other way if someone tried to slip through the security screen. Someone wasted their bribe money there. He never saw me go into the building after Crossbones, and he didn't see the Falcon, either, because he didn't think to look up."
"Sam was there?" Steve interrupted.
"He was going to try to break you out." Bucky was grinning now, not simply smirking. "I almost blew his head off when he tried to jump me at Crossbones' targeting position. He doesn't like me much."
Sharon stepped around the door-frame and hovered tentatively in the doorway, MJ at her back. "He doesn't like your methods," she said. "Sam doesn't believe in cold-blooded vengeance, or in killing."
Her eyes were red, and her face was still blotchy from crying, but otherwise there was no sign in her demeanor that she'd just fled the room in tears. Agent 13 was on the job again.
"Sharon," Steve began again, not sure what he wanted to say to her, but knowing he needed to say something, "I --".
"I'm so, so sorry, Steve," she cut in, over-riding him. "I swear I didn't know what I was doing, but that doesn't make all that much difference at the end of the day."
"You -- what? Sharon, there was nothing you could have done." You were there, he wanted to say. You were there to hold my hand and tell me everything was going to be okay. It didn't matter that they had both known she was lying; he hadn't been alone.
There was no way he could tell her that in the middle of a roomful of people, so he did the next best thing. "We can talk about it later," he promised. "Right now we have a job to do."
"Supervillains to catch, crazy dictators to fight," Peter said. He let go of the wall and dropped back down to the floor, already ticking off points on his fingers as he landed. "Evil conspiracies to be afraid of."
"There are so many different conspiracies in SHIELD that even the people pulling the strings don't know what's going on." Jessica had been leaning against the wall, arms folded across her chest. Now she straightened up and took a few steps into the center of the room, dropping the pretense of being merely an observer. "I wasn't the only source Hydra had, and God knows who else was on some secret organization's payroll. Fury used to keep a list."
Sharon was still staring at him, something indefinable in her eyes. When she saw that he had noticed, she looked away, eyes going to Strange's mirror. It was still showing the front of the building, now deserted. Outside, it had started to rain again.
"Considering that one of their staff psychologists turned out to be Dr. Faustus, anybody in SHIELD could be a sleeper agent for Red Skull." Bucky said, not so much answering Jessica as addressing the room at large. "They wouldn't even know it themselves until it was too late."
Steve looked at Sharon, who was still staring at the floor. Doctor Faustus had been Sharon's psychologist? What had he done to her? Was that why she wouldn't look at him?
"And somebody in Washington has been putting pressure on Maria Hill since back before this whole mess started," Sharon put in. Her eyes went to Steve for a brief moment, then flicked away again. If Dr. Faustus had been posing as her psychologist, it was no wonder she wouldn't look at him. God alone knew what he'd done to her. "She had no grounds to order you to help enforce registration, or to give her anyone's names; the superhuman registration act was still being voted on. If the vote had gone the other way, it would have been a criminal order."
"It was still a criminal order." The fact that Hill had actually ordered her men to shoot him when he refused to obey had been all he needed to know where the situation had been headed. He had over-reacted, massively, stupidly over-reacted, but he had still been in the right.
"We all know SHIELD is dirty," Luke said. "And we already knew about Doom and Red Skull hooking up. What does Fury have for us that we don't know? He got any theories on what they want?"
"To take advantage of the golden opportunity you people offered them when you started fighting each other." The words might have been coming from Bucky's mouth, but they were vintage Nick Fury bluntness.
Luke glared at him, and Peter opened his mouth to protest, but Steve cut him off. "Red Skull feeds on chaos," he said. "He always has. Doom isn't as easy to predict."
"He wants power," Strange said. "Any kind of power. And he'll do anything to get it. The ritual he used to bring you back involved compacts with some extremely dangerous forces."
Steve had already guessed that, Doom being Doom. For a moment, he wondered idly what being brought back from the dead with evil magic did to one's soul.
It wasn't important, not alongside figuring out what Doom was planning to do. "If the level of risk involved is that high, why bring me back at all?"
"To gloat." Beneath his mask, Peter was probably rolling his eyes. "Doom lives to gloat. He's even better at it than Doc Ock."
"What is it with supervillains and gloating, anyway?" Luke asked. He shook his head, then went on, "We got more problems than Doom and the Skull. Unless they've started hiring ninjas, there's a third player in town, too."
"Hydra," Jessica said. She folded her arms across her chest, frowning as if the word had left a bad taste in her mouth.
Iron Fist shook his head. "Not unless they've started some internal war we don't know about. A couple of weeks ago, they were crawling out of the woodwork; now they're practically gone. They're even leaving Rand-Meachum alone. These are new guys, and they're dedicated. Luke and I took one down a couple of nights ago, and he killed himself before we could ask him any questions."
"Had a tattoo, though," Luke put in. "Like Iron Fist's, but fancier."
Iron Fist nodded. "A green dragon with the character for the number ten superimposed over it."
Steve ran a hand through his hair, and bit back a curse. "The Mandarin," he said. "That’s got to be the Mandarin."
"I’ve heard of him. Some crazy old Chinese guy with alien rings, right?" Iron Fist said, frowning thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Peter said, cocking his head to one side. "I thought he died years ago."
Steve shook his head. "Supposedly," he said. "But Tony was always sure that he was still out there, somewhere."
"That doesn’t mean--" Jessica started, gesturing shortly.
Whatever else she had been going to say was lost, cut off as a dull roar reverberated through the room, rattling the windows.
There was a moment of dead silence, as they all stared at each other. Then Peter rubbed at one ear through his mask, and said, "Oh, no way. No supervillain has timing that good, not even Doom."
* * *
*Dugan,* Tony was already moving through the burnt-out lobby of Stark Tower; if what he feared was true, there was no time to lose.
It had been years since the Mandarin had actively surfaced; not since he had built his damned Dragon of Heaven ship. Tony had hoped against hope that he might actually be dead, but he had always known that there was a chance that he would resurface in some form or another.
Tony didn’t want to believe that he was back now, but he knew that there was virtually no one else who could have killed Temugin.
They would have to act quickly, but maybe it wasn’t entirely too late. There were already a handful of SHIELD agents station in China, and while the Mandarin almost certainly had his rings back already, at least they might be able to keep him from building a power base. One of the most dangerous things about the Mandarin had always been his ability to command the loyalty of so many men.
*Sir?* Dugan was on the Helicarrier; Tony had put him in charge of actively dispatching SHIELD agents. Most of the agents responded better to Dugan than they did to him; Dugan knew how to talk to them. *Agent Brickner told you about the An Hu Po massacre?*
*Yes. I’ll need any data you have on that. Did they have any information on how the massacre started? And which of the prisoners escaped?* An Hu Po was a state psychiatric facility; it housed some of China’s most dangerously psychotic criminals. It was rumored that there were illegal tests preformed on the inmates, but no one had ever bothered to examine the place too closely.
Stupid. So stupid. An Hu Po was China's version of the Raft and Arkham Asylum all rolled into one, and none of his people knew anything about the facilities, the security protocols, or even the prisoners. The pending UN investigatory team had never managed to get off the ground, since the politicians were more concerned with maintaining international trade than checking on possible human rights violations.
*kzzt*...311...*kzzt*...309...*
*Of course sir.* Dugan said. *According to, Brickner, you said that we’re treating this as a terrorist action. Are we dispatching men immediately, or do you need to personally review the data first?* There was a note of faint disapproval in his voice. Dugan wasn’t fond of Tony's methods, and he had never made any real attempt to hide his feelings. It was one of the reasons Tony had kept the man around.
*...276...*kzzt*...273...*
Tony paused for a moment, frowning. He was getting a strange data feed from the Helicarrier, but with the sheer number of data streams he was processing at the moment, it was hard to tell where it was coming from.
*The agents already in China can begin an official investigation into what happened at An Hu Po, but I need to review what’s happening before we send any more men in. We may have a bigger problem than just your run of the mill terrorists. Temugin has just been reported dead; it’s possible that we’re dealing with the Mandarin.*
*Oh, that's just great,* Dugan said, his sarcasm coming through clearly even over the scratchy satellite uplink. *Ten to one says he starts blowing things up, too, probably starting with Hong Kong.*
*I think he already has,* Tony returned. *The CSI people haven't finished analyzing the body yet, but I bet when they do, they'll tell us our suicide bomber was wearing one of his Dragon of Heaven tattoos.*
*kzzt*...233...*kzzt*...231...*
"And where the hell is that countdown coming from?" he added aloud, stopping again to raise one hand to rub at his forehead. Tony wasn’t sure whether it was the amount of data he was processing or the fact that he hadn’t slept in the past thirty-six hours, but he was starting to get a headache.
Then his eyes widened, and he started for the door, not quite running. *Dugan! Get everyone off the Helicarrier! Now!*
Sir? Dugan asked. It was times like this that Tony wished that there was someone left that trusted him implicitly.
*kzzt*...212...*kzzt*...209...*kzzt*
*There’s a countdown coming from the Helicarrier, Dugan, which means that there’s got to be a bomb somewhere. Get everyone off, now!* Tony pulled off his suit jacket as he called for the armor. *You’ve got three and a half minutes.*
He hit the street, and was in the air instantly, heading for the Helicarrier at top speed. Maybe if he could get there in time...
*We’re over the city. If something happens to the Helicarrier here, the debris is going to do a hell of lot of damage. We need to get it out, over the water,* Dugan said. *I can take her out myself...*
*...187...*kzzt*...184...*
*No! I need you directing things from the ground.* There was a moment of silence, so Tony added, *Come on Dugan, I know you don’t like me. Do you really want me running things unsupervised?*
*All right.* Dugan said, sounding weary. *Agent Calamai has volunteered to pilot her out anyway.* Agent Calamai was one of SHIELD’s older agents, an Italian man with a special fondness for piloting the Helicarrier. He still hadn’t forgiven Tony for replacing the old Helicarrier, no matter how heavily bugged it had been.
*I’ll be there in a minute. Just get as many people off as possible.*
As he flew, Tony dropped all of the open data-feeds he had been maintaining, turning all of his attention to analyzing the signal coming from the Helicarrier.
It was directed at ten different locations on the Helicarrier. Ten. Of course there would be ten bombs; the Mandarin always did have a flare for the needlessly melodramatic.
*172...*kzzt*...170...*
At least it wasn’t a giant ship shaped like a dragon this time.
*kzzt*...168...*kzzt*...166...*kzzt*...163...*
Of course, it would be nearly impossible to find and disarm ten bombs in the remaining three minutes, but if he could find even some of them, they might be able to minimize the damage substantially...
Tony could see the cluster of SHIELD agents on the docks from the air. Dugan was visible to one side of the group, obviously issuing orders to the men around him. He could see the Helicarrier moving out over the water, away from the city. It was a fair distance out already; Agent Calamai clearly took his charge to get the Helicarrier far enough from the city to keep it from doing any damage seriously.
There were a number of cars in the air, obviously transporting agents off the ship. Unfortunately, they weren’t designed for a mass exodus, and the Helicarrier didn’t really have lifeboats; it was a serious oversight that he would have to look into as soon as possible.
*...149...*kzzt*...147...*kzzt*...*
*Dugan,* Tony called, *how many men have made it off the Helicarrier?*
*...138...*kzzt*...136...*kzzt*...133...*
*Approximately thirty five percent,* Dugan said. *A little more than that with the people in the air. How much time do we have left?*
*kzzt*...115...*kzzt*
Thirty five percent. There was no way they’d be able to get everyone off in time. He would have to disable the bombs. There was almost certainly one by the fuel tanks; that one would do the most damage, and would have to be first priority.
*Under two minutes,* Tony told Dugan. *I’m going to try and disable at least one of the bombs.* He was out over the water now.
*...97...*kzzt*...93...*
*There’s not a chance in hell you’d be able to disable any of the bombs and get away in time,* Dugan snapped. And he had a point, but it was a risk that Tony would have to take. Sixty percent of the SHEILD agents currently in residence were still on the Helicarrier. They couldn’t lose that many men.
*kzzt*...74...*kzzt*...71...*kzzt*...68...*
*There’s a good chance that there’s a major explosive device by the fuel tanks, and the rest are secondary; we can minimize the damage if we can stop them from blowing. It might save some of the men still aboard.* Nearly there.
*...51...*kzzt*...48...*
*With all due respect, sir,* Dugan said; and that was a definite invective, since Dugan never bothered to pretend that he respected Tony. *Getting yourself killed won’t help the situation any --*
*The armor ought to protect me,* Tony said. *It’s designed to withstand fairly high-level blasts.*
*...9...*kzzt*...8...*kzzt*...7...*
He was thirty yards away. So close.
The shock-wave hit Tony like a stone wall, along with a searing heat that he could feel even inside the armor. He was thrown, tossed like a rag doll, the force cart-wheeling him through the air.
When Tony hit the water, the impact was enough to stun him, and everything went black for a moment. The next thing he knew, metal shrapnel was bouncing off the armor, the ringing in his ears deadening the noise.
By the time he managed to pull himself out of the water and get airborne again, the sky was filling with smoke, charred pieces of metal and ash raining into the New York harbor.
His armor wouldn’t have been able to stand up to the Mandarin's bombs after all; if he had been any closer, he would almost certainly have been dead. The explosion had torn the Helicarrier completely apart.
* * *
Next chapter
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony. Really, really, Steve/Tony -- ignore the fact that it will take three chapters to get there. Also, various canon ships, including Peter/MJ and Luke/Jessica/Danny. Sharon/Winter Soldier, for your daily dosage of bondage kink.
Warnings: Denial fic. Blatant shipper fic. One non-canonical het pairing in later chapters. A dire lack of porn. Terrifying amounts of snuggling and angst in later chapters.
Summary: Doom brings Steve back from the dead. Hijinks ensue, some of which might vaugely be considered plot. Surprisingly, this isn't actually crack-fic -- it's just Marvel.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Chapter One
Note: This fic will be thirteen chapters long, posted twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. For a rundown of where this fic departs from current continuity, go (here). Familiarity with the events of Civil War is encouraged, and you pretty much have to have read Civil War: The Confession.
Thank you to
harmonyangel and tavella for the wonderful beta job.*Tony, if you need me to --*
*No,* he interrupted, *stay there, Carol. The response teams have the DC incident under control.*
*Nice to know somebody’s got something under control.* Carol snapped. Tony could hear shouting in the background, distorted and made unintelligible by static -- Carol’s powers might no longer be Binary-level, but they still weren’t kind to headsets. *And I wasn't talking about DC. Are you all --*
***Violence rises in Los Angeles this morning, as tensions run high in the wake of yesterday’s bombing…***
"Mr. Stark, this crime scene is under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; you can’t just bring in SHIELD and sweep it all under the--"
***Emergency workers are still trying to recover the bodies of an unknown number of victims killed when a Los Angeles apartment block…***
"Mr. Stark, the fire and rescue guys need to know if --"
***Federal law enforcement agencies released a statement this morning confirming that the explosive device located and dismantled on the Mall yesterday did in fact contain anthrax…***
Nothing new. Just the same recycled broadcasts that had been playing since eight this morning. Tony cut the data feeds from CNN and turned his attention back to Carol. *You and Ares do what you can. Sentry should get there soon.* He opened the feed to Bob’s headset. *Sentry. ETA?*
*An hour, maybe? I could try to fly faster, but I think --*
*Just do the best you can.* Tony cut Bob off and returned to Carol again. *Sentry estimates his ETA at an hour. You and Ares keep the crowd under control until he gets there.*
"Mr. Stark, are you even listening to --"
"Yes," Tony said shortly. "That column is load-bearing. Do I look like the kind of man who sticks ornamental columns in my office buildings?" It should have been obvious from the support column's location alone that it was a redundancy feature, designed to hold part of the weight of the second floor balcony in case the floor beams were overloaded beyond their capacity. "Agent Gilbert," he made an attempt to bring his tone back to something that approximated calm and moderate, "I appreciate your concern, but SHIELD’s anti-terrorism division is handling this case. We’ll send you a report when we’re finished."
***... the Premier was attacked early this morning... he has been hospitalized with minor injuries...***
Tony rubbed at his forehead, his hand coming away covered in ash and the grey dust of pulverized concrete. The world was almost as much of complete and utter mess as Stark Tower, and he had no idea where to even start trying to fix it.
With the superhero community so distracted and divided for the past few months, there had been a major spike in day-to-day, street level crime and gang violence as criminals took advantage of the situation. And now Doctor Doom and the Red Skull were also taking advantage of the chaos.
Doom had been sending waves of minions to attack New York City, for reasons Tony had yet to figure out. Reed Richards was still on vacation with Sue, and Doom usually timed his various world-domination attempts to make certain that Reed would be caught in the middle of them. This time, however, he had apparently found something even more entertaining than his old vendetta.
Of course, they could never prove that the attackers were Doom' s men satisfactorily enough to actually do anything about it. That would have been too easy. Instead, the bastard sat in the Latverian Embassy flaunting his diplomatic immunity and laughing at them through his metal mask.
They were just as certain who was behind the recent rise in terrorist activity, but the problem there was less proving that it was Red Skull, and more actually finding him. When he wanted to, Red Skull could hide himself like a maggot on a carcass.
First, there had been the bomb in Times Square two weeks ago. Nearly twenty people had been killed or injured, and there had been considerable structural damage done to the surrounding buildings. Thankfully, there had been no biological or radioactive component to the bomb, which would have made the death toll infinitely higher.
There had been a biological component to the bomb that they had dismantled on the Mall yesterday; it had been loaded with enough anthrax spores to infect several hundred people at least.
But the Mall was far too open an area for biological agents to be properly effective; Tony should have known that it was a distraction before half the apartment blocks in LA started blowing up.
***Fires continue to burn unabated in bombed sections of Los Angeles...***
The bombs had been centered in poor, largely Hispanic neighborhoods, which had complicated matters for any variety of reasons. For one thing, the high number of immigrants in those neighborhoods meant that many of the residents spoke little or no English. And since many of them were there illegally, they tended to be scared of authority figures, and a number of people had hidden from the SHIELD agents and superheroes who were trying to rescue them.
They couldn't even be sure whether they had actually managed to get everyone out, since so many of the buildings were over-crowded, filled with people that didn't show up on any tenant rolls.
And then, this morning, a suicide bomber had succeeded in blowing up Stark Tower’s lobby.
"Mr. Stark, I know this is your building, and that you're Director of SHIELD, but you've got to understand, my men are just trying to do their jobs, and that would be a lot easier if you'd just answer a few questions --"
*Jen, you speak Spanish, right?* Tony ignored the agent, turning his attention to She-Hulk.
*Some. Why?*
*All right, then I want you to head out to LA as soon as possible; SHIELD can handle things here, but we could use another visible hero out there, especially one who can speak Spanish.*
"Sir," and that was Jarvis; he actually deserved some attention. "What would you like me to do with this?" He was holding a small picture frame. The lobby had been filled with a number of paintings, largely chosen by Jarvis. Most of them had been destroyed in the blast, and Tony thought that Jarvis was almost more upset by that than anything else.
***Yet another Synagogue was desecrated in Paris... religious violence threatens to break out if these attacks continue...***
"Let me see," Tony said, gesturing at the frame. Jarvis handed it to him, and Tony took it, half an eye on the picture, half on the repairs going on across the room.
***According to Reverend Phelps, the recent attacks are a sign from above, a sign from God that we should have taken the decimation of the mutant population more seriously, that we should have seen that God wants us to eradicate these unnatural aberrations.... Reverend Phelps, a few words?***
"Agent Gilbert, tell your men to stay below the fourth floor; all of the structural damage is on the third and below. They’re already interfering enough with SHIELD’s attempts to handle this terrorist action, they don’t need to interfere with business as well," Tony said, glancing down at the picture Jarvis had handed him.
He nearly dropped it, and only managed not to because Agent Gilbert was still standing next to him, looking impatient, and the room was filled with SHIELD agents he was technically in charge of.
It was a pen and ink sketch, a slightly cartoony picture of the original Avengers, with Jan out in front at Wasp-size, posed like a pin-up model.
"I really don’t care what you do with this," he said, handing the picture back to Jarvis hurriedly. "Get rid of it, it’s singed anyway."
***A fifteen year old girl with dyed-green hair was found beaten today, outside of Lansing, Kansas... this is the seventh such incident in the past two days... boy with a club foot, and a man with a harelip were severely injured in an incidence of mob violence yesterday...***
The series of lynchings in the Bible Belt weren’t exactly unexpected, but they were certainly unwelcome. They were also completely outside of SHIELD’s jurisdiction, which meant that there wasn’t much Tony could do about them at the moment.
"Sir?" And that was Agent Brickner, one of SHIELD’s twenty-three-year-old recruits, and every inch Nick Fury’s man.
"Just a moment, Brickner," Tony said, holding up a hand. He was still scanning through the various newscasts, trying to keep as up to date on the world-wide situation as possible.
*Carol, if you have a chance, get someone to fly through the mid-west. It seems like they could use a show of force.*
*They’re frightened civilians, Tony.* Carol sounded stressed and exhausted. Tony could sympathize; he had been in LA yesterday, until the attack on Stark Tower had called him back to New York.
Thank God Pepper was still visiting her mother; Tony couldn’t begin to imagine what he would do if something happened to her right now.
*They may be frightened, but that’s no excuse for attacking people for having poor fashion sense.*
"Sir? We just got a report that Agent Dugan said you needed to hear about --"
Tony closed his eyes, running a hand through his hair. "Yes, Agent Brickner?"
There’s been a massacre at the An Hu Po State Psychiatric Facility. All the guards and prisoners were found dead yesterday morning, and there are signs that one or more of the prisoners may have escaped. No one knows what happened, but China’s considering it a possible terrorist threat, and Agent Dugan wants to know if we’re taking action."
Just what they needed. SHIELD was spread thin enough as it was; sending agents to China would probably mean pulling people out of LA.
*Bob? How close are you to Los Angeles?* If they could get most of the Avengers helping in LA, more SHIELD agents could be sent elsewhere; they weren’t really trained for Search and Rescue anyway.
*About forty-five minutes, I think? I can try to hurry if you need --*
*Don’t push yourself, Bob. We’ll need you on your feet when you reach LA.*
"The Chinese Premier was attacked this morning; I think we’re going to have to treat it as a terrorist act," Tony told Brickner. "Tell Dugan to tell them that we’ll send agents as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir," Agent Brickner said, saluting, and hurrying off, presumably to contact Dugan somewhere quieter.
There was a loud thud from across the room, as a piece of concrete hit the lobby’s marble floor. "Would you tell your men to watch it? That’s the third time they’ve dropped rubble in the course of their supposed investigation," Tony snapped, turning to Gilbert, who was still hovering. He had thought he was too burned out to feel anything anymore, but it turned out that incompetence could still irritate him. "At the moment, the structural damage is comparatively minimal, and I’d like to keep it that way. There’s really no reason..."
***Signs of unrest continue to mount in China as Temugin, son of the infamous supervillain, the Mandarin, was found dead today...***
Temugin had had the Mandarin's rings. Tony could have bet money that they weren't on his fingers anymore, but there wasn't a Casino in Vegas that would take those odds.
The fact that he was feeling nothing but a sort of dull shock probably wasn’t a good thing, but it was all that Tony had the energy left for at the moment.
Because put together with what Agent Brickner had just told him, things had just gotten infinitely worse.
After the initial round of embarrassing hugging was over, Steve was allowed to sit down and finish his cereal, while everyone else fell all over themselves attempting to fill him in on the rest of what had happened while he was... gone.
It still felt odd to think of himself as having been dead. Better to avoid thinking about what had happened at the courthouse and afterwards and concentrate only on what had to be done now.
Technically, he was supposed to be on trial or in jail, but he didn't even know if the charges against him were still in effect. They said he'd been buried with military honors, which meant something, but he wasn't sure what. Possibly only that Tony had felt guilty.
Registration was really, truly in effect now; according to Luke, most of the superhero community had signed up, and only the New Avengers and a few other groups -- criminals like the Punisher and Moon Knight, those runaway kids from California, and the Young Avengers, who had apparently fallen off the map -- remained outside the system. America had itself a superhuman army now, and Steve wasn't sure he wanted to know how they were going to use it.
Matt Murdock had returned from wherever he had disappeared to and was putting the fear of God -- or, more accurately, the fear of the devil -- into the denizens of Hell's Kitchen. He was still unregistered as well, had even somehow managed to get the charges against him dropped and his license to practice law re-instated.
In retrospect, the witch trial the public and the FBI had put Daredevil through had been the beginning of the end, the first sign of just how much the American people had lost faith in superheroes. Or maybe it had begun before that. Maybe Hector Ayala's trial had been the first sign.
The Fantastic Four had registered, and Sue and Reed had apparently patched their marriage back together. No one was sure what the X-Men were doing, which was possibly the one thing in the whole scenario that hadn't changed from the old days.
Nick Fury was still underground, and no one had seen Sam or Sharon since they'd tried to break Steve out of SHIELD custody. That worried Steve even more than Tony's superhero army.
"She vanished from the hospital," Jessica Drew had said, shrugging. "I don't know where or how. I don't have any contacts in SHIELD any more, or even in Hydra. I think maybe Stark's people got to her."
"They're 'getting' to people now?"
"They got Arachne," she said. "She has a position in Canada now, on one of their pet superhero teams, and never mind that Ms. Marvel and Wonderman dragged her screaming out of her house and away from her kid to throw her in the negative zone. They even got to Ben Urich; he's back on staff at the Bugle and hasn't published a word opposing registration since you died." She had stared down at her hands for a moment, then looked back up at Steve. "They got you."
"That wasn't Tony's people," Steve had protested. "It was a sniper."
Jessica had smiled a cynical little smile and let the subject drop.
Steve hadn't pushed it. Arguing the point would mean reliving those memories of being shot, and dwelling on them would serve no purpose.
He had asked about clothing instead, pointing out that he couldn't go barefoot and wear Luke's spare work-out clothes indefinitely, and MJ had disappeared upstairs and returned with one of his old costumes. The reinforced tunic had been ripped and clumsily repaired, the boots were scuffed, and one of the wings on the mask was bent.
"Peter and I found it while we were clearing out the safe-house, and we didn't know what to do with it. So I just stuck it in a box. I mean, I couldn't just throw it away..." she let the sentence trail off, and held the boots out to him like an offering.
"Thank you," Steve had said, not entirely sure which he was thanking her for. He had taken the boots, and gone to get dressed.
Now, once again wearing familiar blue, red, and white, mask back in place, Steve decided that it was good to be back in the costume, even if the tears had been sewn up with thread that didn't match, the crooked black stitches standing out visibly against the blue leather. He stared at himself in Strange's bathroom mirror -- a full-length stand mirror, its frame matching the golden claw-feet of the freestanding bathtub -- and made an attempt to pull the bent wing on his cowl straight again. As soon as he let go, it returned to its previous position.
It was still in better shape than the costume he had been wearing... before.
As always, once back in costume, he felt naked without his shield. No one seemed to know exactly where it was, but the general consensus seemed to be that SHIELD most likely still had it.
"Probably planning to hand it off to some obedient little lap dog who jumps when they call," Luke had said, snorting.
The thought of someone else using his shield made Steve's stomach twist a little, it had been with him for so long, and was so much a part of him.
Even now, though, even after everything that had happened, Steve had a hard time seeing Tony just giving his shield to someone else; he knew, probably better than anyone else, how Steve felt about it.
But maybe, after everything that had happened, Steve didn't know Tony as well as he had thought anymore. Maybe he would just pass the shield on to someone else; it would certainly make a good show for the press, if nothing else.
One more thing to be dealt with. One more problem to solve. It was a minor issue compared with the arrest warrants hanging over the New Avengers' heads, but the absence of weight across his back where the shield was supposed to hang made him feel even more off balance.
Steve gave up attempting to fix the bent wing, turning away from the mirror -- and dropped into a crouch, reaching automatically for the shield that wasn't there, as Dr. Strange's voice emerged from the smooth glass surface.
"Everyone assemble in my study. The perimeter alarms have been tripped."
Steve made it to the study in under a minute, but was still nearly the last to arrive, ducking into the room just as Peter, also in costume, dropped down from the hallway ceiling like a shadow. When had Spiderman returned to wearing black?
"I took the precaution of setting up surveillance spells around the outside of the building," Strange said. He waved a hand at a small mirror on the far wall, and the reflection rippled and shifted until it showed a crystal clear view of the front of the building, currently a mess of construction debris walled off behind a chain-link fence. A man in a black motorcycle jacket and a woman with a blonde ponytail were standing in front of the fence, staring at the water-stained sign that proclaimed, "Starbucks! Coming soon!"
"Let them in." The words were out of his mouth before he thought about them; even from the back, he recognized them both instantly. "It's Sharon and Bucky."
"I don't know." Luke was shaking his head, arms folded across his chest. "We bring them in, our secret hideout won't be so secret anymore."
"Let them in," Steve repeated. "They're Fury's people." And I need to see them, he added silently. Sharon had been with him when he died; she most of all had the right to know that he was back.
"They were Fury's people," Peter pointed out from his spot halfway up the wall. "We've got no idea what they've been doing for the past six weeks. And Agent Carter works for SHIELD."
"Let them in."
"I say we risk it." Rand shrugged, and pulled his yellow mask out of the pocket of his jeans. "We have to trust somebody, sometime, and there are two of them and seven of us." He started tying the mask on; it should have looked incongruous combined with civilian clothing, but somehow didn't.
Strange spoke a word in a language Steve didn't recognize, and there was a flare of pink smoke in the center of the room. When it cleared, Sharon and Bucky were standing there, right on top of the patch of floor Steve had woken up on.
They both had their guns out, and Iron Fist and Spiderman were already moving. A spray of webbing ripped Sharon's weapon away from her before she could finish raising it, and Iron Fist launched himself at Bucky in a flying kick, right foot knocking the gun out of his hand. Bucky sidestepped, pivoting and extending his left hand in a move that Steve had taught him himself, years ago -- one that, if the blow connected, would put his steel fingers right through Iron Fist's ribs.
"Bucky!" Steve barked, pitching his voice to the same drill-sergeant tone he'd used during the war, "Stand down."
It was too late for Bucky to pull the blow completely, but he still managed to check himself enough that the strike that should have shattered Iron Fist's ribs did little more than knock him off balance.
Rand hit the floor on his shoulder, rolled to his feet, and stood with one fist raised and ready to strike, a golden corona glowing around it. "You're good. Want to try that again?"
Bucky ignored him. He was staring at Steve, his face completely empty of emotion. Beside him, Sharon had let her empty hands fall to her sides. She ought to have been happy, but the expression on her face, dead-pale, and wide eyed, looked much closer to horror.
"Are you two all right?" Steve asked. Suddenly it was very, very important that he know.
"Am I --" Sharon's voice sounded choked. She took a step forward, and Bucky grabbed her by the arm, pulling her up short.
"We don't know who that is." He turned to Steve, face still expressionless, and said, "Prove you're him."
Steve cocked his head to one side, thinking for a moment, trying to select some bit of information from their shared past that no one else in this time period would know. "Remember April 29th, 1945?" He paused, just long enough for Bucky to nod, then added, "I threw up, you didn’t." Even after sixty years, it was still one of the most horrible things Steve had ever seen. Bucky was the only one who had been there to witness his reaction, and neither of them had ever spoken of it afterwards, even to one another.
Bucky continued to stare at him for a long moment, before nodding, stance relaxing almost imperceptibly. "It’s him," he said, not taking his eyes off of Steve. He let go of Sharon’s arm, and crossed the room to stand in front of Steve, holding out his right hand. Steve took it, and they clasped hands for a long moment, leaning toward one another until their shoulders brushed. "It’s good to have you back," Bucky said, smiling slightly.
At that, Sharon, who had been watching them with a frozen look, made a quiet keening noise. "Sharon?" Steve asked, letting go of Bucky’s hand to move towards her.
She shook her head, eyes welling with tears. "I -- oh, God," she said in a small voice. Then she turned, raising one hand to her eyes, and left the room quickly.
There was a moment of frozen silence, as everyone stared at the empty doorway. Then MJ rolled her eyes, said, "Oh, for goodness sakes," and followed Sharon out of the room.
"I thought she'd be happy." It was ridiculous to feel hurt. Of course Sharon would want privacy for a few minutes; she'd never been comfortable shedding tears in public. It was too close to a display of weakness.
Bucky glanced at the doorway, eyes avoiding Steve's for a second. "She thinks it was her fault."
"She had nothing to do with it." Everyone seemed to think they knew more about his death than he did, Steve reflected. "There was a sniper in one of the buildings; I saw the dot from his laser scope." There was nothing Sharon could have done, save for throwing herself bodily between him and the bullets, and he was selfishly glad she hadn't done that; living at the expense of a friend's life wouldn't have been worth it.
Bucky nodded. "Crossbones. We killed him for you." He said it matter-of-factly, the way Steve might announce that he'd fought or captured a minor supervillain. It was hard, sometimes, to see the enthusiastic kid he'd met in '42 in this new, adult Bucky. "I tried to get information on Red Skull from him, but he wouldn't talk."
"Um, yeah, about Red Skull, actually, about supervillains in general..." That was Peter, still crouched halfway up the wall. "Why are you here? Not that this isn't a great reunion and everything, and not that we aren't loving the cryptic code conversation, but --"
"Nick Fury sent us," Bucky said, cutting Peter off. "We got wind that Red Skull and Doctor Doom had formed an alliance. They were seen meeting in a warehouse two nights ago; our operative couldn’t see what they were doing, but there’s no way it was good. Nick thought that as long as you weren’t fighting each other anymore, at least one of the groups of superheroes ought to know about the situation." From the way he said it, Steve suspected that Nick had had a great deal more to say about the situation than that, and rather more bluntly.
"Actually," Doctor Strange said, stepping forward, "they were performing a resurrection ritual. Now, although I’m certain that they had nothing but the worst of intentions, due to a timely intervention, I believe that we can agree that things have turned out well."
Bucky didn’t quite twitch. "Red Skull and Doctor Doom brought you back?" he asked.
"I’m trying not to think about it," Steve told him.
"Why come to us?" Jessica asked. "Why not go to SHIELD and let their pet initiative teams take care of it?"
"Because they're compromised, " Bucky said. "Red Skull had agents inside the organization. Sharon's psychologist was one of them, and so was one of the crowd control agents at Cap's arraignment. He did a lot more talking than Crossbones."
Did Nick know that his current subordinates were torturing his former subordinates for information? Uneasily, Steve concluded that he probably did. He wasn't anywhere near as omniscient as he liked to pretend, but Nick was still a consummate judge of people, and had never minded getting his hands dirty.
For a moment, Steve wondered which of the guards it had been. The one who had muttered about "costumed hotshots" when he unlocked Steve's cell? The kid who kept forgetting himself and calling Steve "sir"? The one who had been in front of him on the steps, whom he'd tried to save from the sniper's bullet?
There was a reason he had always preferred a straight-forward fight to intelligence work, and it wasn't simply because beating up Hydra agents was less complicated.
"What did this agent have to say?" Strange had his "impassive sorcerer" face on once again, and managed to give the impression that he already knew the answer and was merely asking out of politeness.
"Nothing useful; he wasn't important enough for that." Bucky smirked ever-so-slightly. "Just that he'd been told to look the other way if someone tried to slip through the security screen. Someone wasted their bribe money there. He never saw me go into the building after Crossbones, and he didn't see the Falcon, either, because he didn't think to look up."
"Sam was there?" Steve interrupted.
"He was going to try to break you out." Bucky was grinning now, not simply smirking. "I almost blew his head off when he tried to jump me at Crossbones' targeting position. He doesn't like me much."
Sharon stepped around the door-frame and hovered tentatively in the doorway, MJ at her back. "He doesn't like your methods," she said. "Sam doesn't believe in cold-blooded vengeance, or in killing."
Her eyes were red, and her face was still blotchy from crying, but otherwise there was no sign in her demeanor that she'd just fled the room in tears. Agent 13 was on the job again.
"Sharon," Steve began again, not sure what he wanted to say to her, but knowing he needed to say something, "I --".
"I'm so, so sorry, Steve," she cut in, over-riding him. "I swear I didn't know what I was doing, but that doesn't make all that much difference at the end of the day."
"You -- what? Sharon, there was nothing you could have done." You were there, he wanted to say. You were there to hold my hand and tell me everything was going to be okay. It didn't matter that they had both known she was lying; he hadn't been alone.
There was no way he could tell her that in the middle of a roomful of people, so he did the next best thing. "We can talk about it later," he promised. "Right now we have a job to do."
"Supervillains to catch, crazy dictators to fight," Peter said. He let go of the wall and dropped back down to the floor, already ticking off points on his fingers as he landed. "Evil conspiracies to be afraid of."
"There are so many different conspiracies in SHIELD that even the people pulling the strings don't know what's going on." Jessica had been leaning against the wall, arms folded across her chest. Now she straightened up and took a few steps into the center of the room, dropping the pretense of being merely an observer. "I wasn't the only source Hydra had, and God knows who else was on some secret organization's payroll. Fury used to keep a list."
Sharon was still staring at him, something indefinable in her eyes. When she saw that he had noticed, she looked away, eyes going to Strange's mirror. It was still showing the front of the building, now deserted. Outside, it had started to rain again.
"Considering that one of their staff psychologists turned out to be Dr. Faustus, anybody in SHIELD could be a sleeper agent for Red Skull." Bucky said, not so much answering Jessica as addressing the room at large. "They wouldn't even know it themselves until it was too late."
Steve looked at Sharon, who was still staring at the floor. Doctor Faustus had been Sharon's psychologist? What had he done to her? Was that why she wouldn't look at him?
"And somebody in Washington has been putting pressure on Maria Hill since back before this whole mess started," Sharon put in. Her eyes went to Steve for a brief moment, then flicked away again. If Dr. Faustus had been posing as her psychologist, it was no wonder she wouldn't look at him. God alone knew what he'd done to her. "She had no grounds to order you to help enforce registration, or to give her anyone's names; the superhuman registration act was still being voted on. If the vote had gone the other way, it would have been a criminal order."
"It was still a criminal order." The fact that Hill had actually ordered her men to shoot him when he refused to obey had been all he needed to know where the situation had been headed. He had over-reacted, massively, stupidly over-reacted, but he had still been in the right.
"We all know SHIELD is dirty," Luke said. "And we already knew about Doom and Red Skull hooking up. What does Fury have for us that we don't know? He got any theories on what they want?"
"To take advantage of the golden opportunity you people offered them when you started fighting each other." The words might have been coming from Bucky's mouth, but they were vintage Nick Fury bluntness.
Luke glared at him, and Peter opened his mouth to protest, but Steve cut him off. "Red Skull feeds on chaos," he said. "He always has. Doom isn't as easy to predict."
"He wants power," Strange said. "Any kind of power. And he'll do anything to get it. The ritual he used to bring you back involved compacts with some extremely dangerous forces."
Steve had already guessed that, Doom being Doom. For a moment, he wondered idly what being brought back from the dead with evil magic did to one's soul.
It wasn't important, not alongside figuring out what Doom was planning to do. "If the level of risk involved is that high, why bring me back at all?"
"To gloat." Beneath his mask, Peter was probably rolling his eyes. "Doom lives to gloat. He's even better at it than Doc Ock."
"What is it with supervillains and gloating, anyway?" Luke asked. He shook his head, then went on, "We got more problems than Doom and the Skull. Unless they've started hiring ninjas, there's a third player in town, too."
"Hydra," Jessica said. She folded her arms across her chest, frowning as if the word had left a bad taste in her mouth.
Iron Fist shook his head. "Not unless they've started some internal war we don't know about. A couple of weeks ago, they were crawling out of the woodwork; now they're practically gone. They're even leaving Rand-Meachum alone. These are new guys, and they're dedicated. Luke and I took one down a couple of nights ago, and he killed himself before we could ask him any questions."
"Had a tattoo, though," Luke put in. "Like Iron Fist's, but fancier."
Iron Fist nodded. "A green dragon with the character for the number ten superimposed over it."
Steve ran a hand through his hair, and bit back a curse. "The Mandarin," he said. "That’s got to be the Mandarin."
"I’ve heard of him. Some crazy old Chinese guy with alien rings, right?" Iron Fist said, frowning thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Peter said, cocking his head to one side. "I thought he died years ago."
Steve shook his head. "Supposedly," he said. "But Tony was always sure that he was still out there, somewhere."
"That doesn’t mean--" Jessica started, gesturing shortly.
Whatever else she had been going to say was lost, cut off as a dull roar reverberated through the room, rattling the windows.
There was a moment of dead silence, as they all stared at each other. Then Peter rubbed at one ear through his mask, and said, "Oh, no way. No supervillain has timing that good, not even Doom."
*Dugan,* Tony was already moving through the burnt-out lobby of Stark Tower; if what he feared was true, there was no time to lose.
It had been years since the Mandarin had actively surfaced; not since he had built his damned Dragon of Heaven ship. Tony had hoped against hope that he might actually be dead, but he had always known that there was a chance that he would resurface in some form or another.
Tony didn’t want to believe that he was back now, but he knew that there was virtually no one else who could have killed Temugin.
They would have to act quickly, but maybe it wasn’t entirely too late. There were already a handful of SHIELD agents station in China, and while the Mandarin almost certainly had his rings back already, at least they might be able to keep him from building a power base. One of the most dangerous things about the Mandarin had always been his ability to command the loyalty of so many men.
*Sir?* Dugan was on the Helicarrier; Tony had put him in charge of actively dispatching SHIELD agents. Most of the agents responded better to Dugan than they did to him; Dugan knew how to talk to them. *Agent Brickner told you about the An Hu Po massacre?*
*Yes. I’ll need any data you have on that. Did they have any information on how the massacre started? And which of the prisoners escaped?* An Hu Po was a state psychiatric facility; it housed some of China’s most dangerously psychotic criminals. It was rumored that there were illegal tests preformed on the inmates, but no one had ever bothered to examine the place too closely.
Stupid. So stupid. An Hu Po was China's version of the Raft and Arkham Asylum all rolled into one, and none of his people knew anything about the facilities, the security protocols, or even the prisoners. The pending UN investigatory team had never managed to get off the ground, since the politicians were more concerned with maintaining international trade than checking on possible human rights violations.
*kzzt*...311...*kzzt*...309...*
*Of course sir.* Dugan said. *According to, Brickner, you said that we’re treating this as a terrorist action. Are we dispatching men immediately, or do you need to personally review the data first?* There was a note of faint disapproval in his voice. Dugan wasn’t fond of Tony's methods, and he had never made any real attempt to hide his feelings. It was one of the reasons Tony had kept the man around.
*...276...*kzzt*...273...*
Tony paused for a moment, frowning. He was getting a strange data feed from the Helicarrier, but with the sheer number of data streams he was processing at the moment, it was hard to tell where it was coming from.
*The agents already in China can begin an official investigation into what happened at An Hu Po, but I need to review what’s happening before we send any more men in. We may have a bigger problem than just your run of the mill terrorists. Temugin has just been reported dead; it’s possible that we’re dealing with the Mandarin.*
*Oh, that's just great,* Dugan said, his sarcasm coming through clearly even over the scratchy satellite uplink. *Ten to one says he starts blowing things up, too, probably starting with Hong Kong.*
*I think he already has,* Tony returned. *The CSI people haven't finished analyzing the body yet, but I bet when they do, they'll tell us our suicide bomber was wearing one of his Dragon of Heaven tattoos.*
*kzzt*...233...*kzzt*...231...*
"And where the hell is that countdown coming from?" he added aloud, stopping again to raise one hand to rub at his forehead. Tony wasn’t sure whether it was the amount of data he was processing or the fact that he hadn’t slept in the past thirty-six hours, but he was starting to get a headache.
Then his eyes widened, and he started for the door, not quite running. *Dugan! Get everyone off the Helicarrier! Now!*
Sir? Dugan asked. It was times like this that Tony wished that there was someone left that trusted him implicitly.
*kzzt*...212...*kzzt*...209...*kzzt*
*There’s a countdown coming from the Helicarrier, Dugan, which means that there’s got to be a bomb somewhere. Get everyone off, now!* Tony pulled off his suit jacket as he called for the armor. *You’ve got three and a half minutes.*
He hit the street, and was in the air instantly, heading for the Helicarrier at top speed. Maybe if he could get there in time...
*We’re over the city. If something happens to the Helicarrier here, the debris is going to do a hell of lot of damage. We need to get it out, over the water,* Dugan said. *I can take her out myself...*
*...187...*kzzt*...184...*
*No! I need you directing things from the ground.* There was a moment of silence, so Tony added, *Come on Dugan, I know you don’t like me. Do you really want me running things unsupervised?*
*All right.* Dugan said, sounding weary. *Agent Calamai has volunteered to pilot her out anyway.* Agent Calamai was one of SHIELD’s older agents, an Italian man with a special fondness for piloting the Helicarrier. He still hadn’t forgiven Tony for replacing the old Helicarrier, no matter how heavily bugged it had been.
*I’ll be there in a minute. Just get as many people off as possible.*
As he flew, Tony dropped all of the open data-feeds he had been maintaining, turning all of his attention to analyzing the signal coming from the Helicarrier.
It was directed at ten different locations on the Helicarrier. Ten. Of course there would be ten bombs; the Mandarin always did have a flare for the needlessly melodramatic.
*172...*kzzt*...170...*
At least it wasn’t a giant ship shaped like a dragon this time.
*kzzt*...168...*kzzt*...166...*kzzt*...163...*
Of course, it would be nearly impossible to find and disarm ten bombs in the remaining three minutes, but if he could find even some of them, they might be able to minimize the damage substantially...
Tony could see the cluster of SHIELD agents on the docks from the air. Dugan was visible to one side of the group, obviously issuing orders to the men around him. He could see the Helicarrier moving out over the water, away from the city. It was a fair distance out already; Agent Calamai clearly took his charge to get the Helicarrier far enough from the city to keep it from doing any damage seriously.
There were a number of cars in the air, obviously transporting agents off the ship. Unfortunately, they weren’t designed for a mass exodus, and the Helicarrier didn’t really have lifeboats; it was a serious oversight that he would have to look into as soon as possible.
*...149...*kzzt*...147...*kzzt*...*
*Dugan,* Tony called, *how many men have made it off the Helicarrier?*
*...138...*kzzt*...136...*kzzt*...133...*
*Approximately thirty five percent,* Dugan said. *A little more than that with the people in the air. How much time do we have left?*
*kzzt*...115...*kzzt*
Thirty five percent. There was no way they’d be able to get everyone off in time. He would have to disable the bombs. There was almost certainly one by the fuel tanks; that one would do the most damage, and would have to be first priority.
*Under two minutes,* Tony told Dugan. *I’m going to try and disable at least one of the bombs.* He was out over the water now.
*...97...*kzzt*...93...*
*There’s not a chance in hell you’d be able to disable any of the bombs and get away in time,* Dugan snapped. And he had a point, but it was a risk that Tony would have to take. Sixty percent of the SHEILD agents currently in residence were still on the Helicarrier. They couldn’t lose that many men.
*kzzt*...74...*kzzt*...71...*kzzt*...68...*
*There’s a good chance that there’s a major explosive device by the fuel tanks, and the rest are secondary; we can minimize the damage if we can stop them from blowing. It might save some of the men still aboard.* Nearly there.
*...51...*kzzt*...48...*
*With all due respect, sir,* Dugan said; and that was a definite invective, since Dugan never bothered to pretend that he respected Tony. *Getting yourself killed won’t help the situation any --*
*The armor ought to protect me,* Tony said. *It’s designed to withstand fairly high-level blasts.*
*...9...*kzzt*...8...*kzzt*...7...*
He was thirty yards away. So close.
The shock-wave hit Tony like a stone wall, along with a searing heat that he could feel even inside the armor. He was thrown, tossed like a rag doll, the force cart-wheeling him through the air.
When Tony hit the water, the impact was enough to stun him, and everything went black for a moment. The next thing he knew, metal shrapnel was bouncing off the armor, the ringing in his ears deadening the noise.
By the time he managed to pull himself out of the water and get airborne again, the sky was filling with smoke, charred pieces of metal and ash raining into the New York harbor.
His armor wouldn’t have been able to stand up to the Mandarin's bombs after all; if he had been any closer, he would almost certainly have been dead. The explosion had torn the Helicarrier completely apart.
Next chapter
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 |
Massacre at An Hu Po. |
Temugin |
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Yes, how isolated Tony has been these months. And you are right! That's the only solution for everything about Tony. He really NEEDS Steve, NOW.
For Tony, thank you bring Steve back!