ext_1177 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
elspethdixon.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cap_ironman2013-06-09 11:40 am
elspethdixon.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2013-06-09 11:40 am
Entry tags:
Reassembled, chapter 12
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 12
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work.
Beta:dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching (most of) our many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Chapter Twelve
Most of the people his age that Clint knew had spent Saturday mornings watching cartoons as kids. He had, too, once, but by the time he'd been a teenager, he'd been getting up early on Saturday mornings to get ready for performances. It had been a decade and a half since then, but he'd never broken the habit.
There was always some part of your equipment that needed cleaning or repairing or replacing. And there were arrows to make; you could never have enough arrows.
Technically, he could have just bought them in bulk from a sports supply store or bow hunting catalog, but Clint preferred to make them to his own specifications. Plus, even online, it was hard to find a supplier that would dye the fletching the right shade of purple.
This morning, he'd settled down in the living room, cutting board, exacto knife, and bag of new purple feathers in hand, and started splitting feathers along the quill, sanding the bottoms down and sorting the halves into clockwise and counterclockwise piles. He'd gotten through twenty minutes of Looney Tunes re-runs and halfway through an episode of some cartoon about teenagers with elemental magic when he realized that something was missing.
"Has anybody seen the cat?" Clint asked the room at large.
"No." Carol turned a page in her book, not looking up. "I think it's hiding somewhere. I haven't seen it since yesterday."
Usually he couldn't keep the cat away when he was fletching arrows — the feathers and the sinew he used to bind the fletches on were apparently some kind of cornucopia of cat delight, and Matt/Patton/Churchill would sit inches from his feet and stare at him with huge, crazed eyes, occasionally reaching up with one questing paw to hook his claws through a loop of sinew or shred a fletch. Then he'd grab a thread of sinew in his teeth and run off to eat it, freezing every few feet to glance back and make sure Clint didn't want to follow him.
"There was food still sitting in his bowl when I got breakfast." Clint frowned down at the feather in his hands. "You don't think he's sick, do you?"
Wanda, laying out tarot cards on the part of the coffee table that wasn't covered in fluffs of purple down and crumbs of that styrofoamy stuff that filled the inside of quill shafts, shook her head. "He's afraid of the Dee manuscript. Redwing won't come in this part of the house, either."
She was sitting on the floor a few feet away from Clint, and when she bent her head to look at the cards, he had a perfect view of the tattoo at the base of her neck. It was weirdly captivating, drawing the eye from the knobs of her spine up to the edge of her hairline.
Clint dropped his eyes back to his hands; Wanda obviously wasn't comfortable with the tattoos, or she wouldn't keep wearing gloves over them. Staring at them felt... invasive.
"I'm going to go look for him," Clint said, standing abruptly and brushing feather barbs off his pants.
Carol gave an absent hum, and turned another page.
"You should leave him alone. He'll come out when he's ready." Wanda swept her cards into a pile with one hand and started shuffling them again, then cut the deck and laid three cards face up.
"The Tower, the Eight of Swords, and the Five of Cups," Clint observed. "That's not good."
She made a face, gathering them up again. "Every spread I do comes out like this. It's statistically impossible. Even I ought to be able to get at least one vaguely positive reading."
"That's... really not good. Should we be worried?"
"Tarot cards don't actually tell you the future, Clint. Don't worry about it. It's not the cards; it's all the ambient chaos. Try flipping a coin ten times in a row and seeing what happens."
"I know they don't tell the future." Clint shrugged, vaguely embarrassed. "I used to work in a carnival." And he'd been up close and personal with demons and gods and magic far more times than anybody should have to be since then. Fortune telling might be ninety percent fakery and telling people what they wanted to hear and ten percent actual mysticism, but getting three sinister-looking cards over and over again couldn't possibly mean anything good.
He was going to need more arrows.
After he made sure the cat wasn't off somewhere chewing through an electrical cord.
The kitchen, the library shelves, and the staircase in the front hall were all cat-less, and so was the monitor room. That left Tony's lab, an endless source of potentially lethal things to destroy.
He'd planned to knock — or, rather, holler through the door — since walking into Tony's work area unannounced could get him either a face full of sparks from some welding project and a rant about safety goggles, or an eye full of Tony and Cap doing something he really didn't need to see. Instead, Clint found the door to the lab partly open, with nothing but silence on the other side.
It was probably safe to go in.
The lab was empty — of people, anyway. The cat was sprawled out across Tony's drafting board, one arm hooked over the top to keep himself from sliding down the incline. Several well-chewed pencils and a shredded blue-print were scattered on the table around him.
"I hope that wasn't important," Clint muttered, grabbing the cat around the middle and draping him over his shoulder. "Come on before you break something expensive."
The cat made an irritated snorting sound and dug his claws into Clint's shoulder blade, hind feet shoving at Clint's chest. His tail thwacked repeatedly against Clint's side, telegraphing annoyance.
There was a single piece of paper in the middle of the drafting board, one edge damp and distinctly chewed-looking. "I bet this was important, too." Clint tried to flatten it out with his free hand, with limited success, and the writing on it caught his eye.
It was a prescription scrip, not a scrap of engineering print-out. A prescription for... Clint squinted at the name, unsure of what it was or even how to pronounce it.
"Hank shouldn't leave these things lying around," he told the cat, picking up the scrip. He was about to shove it into his pocket when he noticed who it was made out for.
Not Henry Pym. Anthony Stark. Which would make sense since this was Tony's lab, but what the hell did he need a prescription for? Hank was the one on two kinds of anti-crazy meds.
Whatever it was, it wasn't likely to be good. Tony didn't go the doctor over normal things like sinus infections; it was always heart surgery and being shot and his armor killing him with electromagnetic fields and experimental poisons that made you hallucinate dead people and other life-or-death or just plain weird things.
That didn't mean this prescription was for one of those things, though. Cap was probably forcing Tony to go to doctors' appointments and other 'good for you' things these days, especially after the poison incident. Cap worried about people; it was what he did.
The cat started to make a low, growling sound of frustration, and thrashed violently in Clint's grasp; he hated being carried or held for more than about sixty-seconds at a time.
"All right, all right, we're leaving the lab of kitty chew toys now. I'll put you down as soon as you're someplace you can't electrocute yourself."
The cat was distinctly ungrateful for Clint's efforts to protect him; the second his paws hit the hallway floor he was gone.
Clint winced; Jarvis wasn't going to be happy when he saw the scratches Matt/Patton/Churchill's claws had left on the shiny new floorboards.
When he heard Jarvis's voice coming from around the corner, he winced again, and considered slapping a foot over the biggest scratch.
"May wanted me to thank you for the tip; we had a lovely time."
"I'm just glad the restaurant is still there." Don's voice, vaguely Midwestern and always deeper than Clint remembered it as — probably because everything sounded high-pitched compared to Thor's rumbling bass. "I think it's been four years since the last time I ate there." He and Jarvis turned the corner, and only a quick side-step on Clint's part kept them from running straight into him.
Don slapped a hand against the wall to steady himself, his cane coming within inches of hitting Clint in the shin. "Sorry," he blurted out. "I didn't know you were there."
Clint shook his head. "It'll teach me not to lurk in hallways. I know what you mean about restaurants closing," he added. "That pizza place by the Met went out of business while I was dead."
"It did?" Don was visibly disappointed. "They were the only place that would still deliver here. And they had that carnivore special with five kinds of meat on it."
Jarvis raised an eyebrow. "I thought they opened while you were... away."
Which was one way to refer to the couple of years after Odin had somehow erased Don out of existence, or separated him from Thor, or... Clint had absolutely no idea how the two of them worked, and never had. It was probably safer just not thinking about it too much.
"Thor liked the carnivore special," Don said, which neatly side-stepped the entire existing and then not existing issue.
Did he remember being dead? Or had he just stopped being at all, after Odin had severed him from Thor, and come back when the Big Guy did?
None of them talked about it, not Thor, not Cap, not Spiderman - who had apparently died and been resurrected with fascinatingly disgusting spinnerets in his wrists while Clint had been gone — and not Clint himself. Cap wouldn't even say the word 'dead'; it was always 'while I was gone,' or 'when I wasn't here,' or 'after I was shot.' Always 'shot,' and never 'killed.' Clint wasn't sure if he avoiding saying it because he didn't like thinking about it, or because of the way Tony and Sam's faces went still and blank whenever you mentioned it.
He'd seen it on the news, when he'd been on his way to Transia; Steve falling, blood dark on the shoulder of his costume, and Sharon going to her knees next to him, and then a crowd of SHIELD personnel swarming in, their bodies blocking the camera shot. Actually being there, the way Sam had, would have been worse.
He didn't know how much of it Steve remembered; more than he did, probably. There had been an explosion — or, no Wanda had been there, with children, and turned her face away from him — and one instant of pain, just long enough for him to think 'This is how Bobbi felt,' and then he'd found himself in London, untouched and alone and knowing, somehow, that a long time had passed.
He wanted to believe he'd been with Bobbi, but if he had, that would mean she was alone now, and if they'd been together, surely she would have come back, too.
"Are you all right?" Jarvis asked.
He was talking to him, Clint realized. Both of them were. "Fine," he said. "Just thinking about something." He was suddenly very conscious of the prescription form in his pocket, for some unknown medication with Tony's name on it.
Don would know what it was for, but he wasn't about to ask him what was wrong with Tony in front of Jarvis. The old guy had been through enough lately, with May's coma and physical therapy; he didn't need to worry about Tony on top of that, especially if it was just something normal and everyday like cold medication.
"Do you have a second?" he asked Don. "There's something I wanted to ask you."
"Sure," Don said, and then there was a long moment of silence while the three of them just stood there.
"Um, just you," Clint clarified.
Jarvis probably assumed that Clint was either going to ask some embarrassing medical question, or talk about his sex life in vivid, over-sharing detail, or both, because he cleared his throat, thanked Don again for the restaurant recommendation, and took his leave.
"If you want," Don said quietly, after Jarvis had left, "I can run the same tests on you that I did on Wanda. If you're worried about dying and coming back, or about being exposed to Chthon in Transia."
"That... wasn't what I was worried about. Well, until just now." The possibility of 'coming back wrong' hadn't even occurred to him. Clint shook the thought off; it was better to not to wonder exactly how Wanda had brought him back, especially since she herself couldn't tell him. "I was kicking the cat out of Tony's work room and found this." He fished the crumpled and ragged-edged piece of paper out of his pocket, and held it out to Don. "It's some kind of prescription scrip. Is it something we should be concerned about?"
Don plucked the paper from Clint's hand and flattened it out, frowning at it. "Huh," he muttered. "He did go see a doctor. Good."
That sounded ominous. "So there is something wrong with him?"
Don looked up again, glanced at Clint's outstretched hand, and pointedly tucked the piece of paper into his shirt pocket. "It's not either of our business."
"Maybe you two don't like each other anymore, but he's still an Avenger. Just tell me whether or not it's serious, okay?"
Don's eyebrows drew together, and for a moment, the stern look in his pale blue eyes was reminiscent of Thor at his most stiff and honorable. "People's medical information is personal, Clint. Go ask Tony if you're so desperate to know."
"He'd say he was fine and lie about it." Which was slightly unfair to Tony, but not by much. He'd managed to hide both a serious heart condition and a steadily worsening drinking problem from the team for months, and back when they'd been on the West Coast, he'd spent all his time hiding behind something mechanical and pretending he was perfectly okay, all the while not meeting anyone's eyes and completely ignoring his hair, beard, clothing, and all the other details of physical appearance and grooming Tony usually devoted what had to be tons of time and money to — he spent more on haircuts alone than Clint spent on archery equipment.
"Which would mean he didn't want you to know," Don shot back.
Clint folded his arms across his chest, and drew himself up to his full height. "I guess you weren't there for the 'we need to support our teammates and help them in their hour of need,' speech Cap gave us all when we first joined the team."
The noble, determined pose never worked as well for him as it did for Cap. Looking unimpressed, Don said, "No, I was there for the 'we'll agree to respect one another's secret identities and not pry into our teammates' private lives' speech that apparently only I remember."
It wasn't prying when your teammate might have something seriously wrong with him.
"Yeah, that was before my time." Clint tried a smile. "Wanda, Pietro and I got the teamwork speech. Repeatedly." Cap had been even bossier back then, and convinced that being five whole years older than everyone else made them all children who needed his wise and experienced guidance. In retrospect, though, even Clint could admit that he and Pietro had been kind of bratty.
Don didn't actually smile, but from the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, that was only because he was trying hard not to. "Ask Tony," he repeated.
"Yeah," Clint agreed. "I will."
Don might have too much in the way of professional ethics to gossip about people's medical records behind their backs, but he wasn't the only Avenger who knew his way around a pharmacy. And professional ethics had never been one of their resident chemistry expert's major concerns.
* * *
The low, concrete building looked unimportant from the outside, squatting on the edge of the small collection of white tanks like an afterthought. The door was painted red, with a yellow plastic sign riveted to it proclaiming 'danger: high voltage.'
The guards at the entrance of the compound that wasn't a chemical plant had been easy to slip past, clearly low-levels unaware of the importance of what they were guarding. She had been tempted to take the extra few minutes and kill them, but the guards checked in with the main building by radio every fifteen minutes, and tonight's goal was too important to jeopardize by risking alerting the target just for the sake of a little fun.
She could always slit their throats on the way out.
Sin crouched low as the rotating camera mounted on the corner of the bunker swiveled in her direction, and gestured to the men behind her to do the same. The camera was angled to detect motion at long range; this close to the building, anything less than two feet off the ground was outside its field of view.
If the information her man on the Helicarrier had sent her was correct, Doom's precious manuscript was inside there, under armed guard. If it was, her last remaining mole in SHIELD would have finally outlived his usefulness; Fury would probably dispose of him for her, saving her the necessity of eliminating loose ends.
He hadn't sent her a decent bit of info in weeks, before last night's message. If this didn't pan out, she might kill him just on principle.
If it did, she was going to take great pleasure in informing Doom that she'd managed to locate and obtain the manuscript completely without his aid. He wouldn't be grateful, of course — gratitude was probably beyond him — but he wanted the book badly enough that she might be able to squeeze a 'please' or 'thank-you' out of him. He would hate choking those words out.
Once she brought Doom the book and he located the spell within it that would allow a "mundane" human access to the spear, she would no longer need to tolerate his arrogance. He would send her out to fetch the spear for him, blindly confident in his own cleverness, and she would do some spell-casting of her own.
Doom was not the only one with access to ancient grimoires. Her father had preferred more conventional — and reliable — means of gaining power, but had been wise enough to take advantage of magic when the opportunity arose.
The pages she currently had tucked away in a secure hiding place were the only remains of a book of dark magic her father and a circle of the Nazi high command had discovered during the second world war. They had attempted to use it to summon a demon from hell to unleash against their enemies, and had they not been interrupted by Fury and his damned Commandos, Allied tanks could have been halted at the French border.
Fury had been interfering in the business of his betters long before the creation of SHIELD. He would be the first to die after Carter and Barnes, she decided. Daddy wanted her to save Rogers for last. Sin had no objections to that.
The single spell remaining from that grimoire would let her claim the power of the spear for herself. It wasn't the cosmic cube, lost with her father's first death, but it would do. America would burn — the world would burn — and from the ashes would arise a new order, in her father's image.
Beside her, Gustave gestured impatiently at the building. Sin nodded sharply; they had delayed long enough.
The front door of the bunker was secured by a single rusted padlock. Behind it, there would be a flight of stairs leading downward and another door, this one equipped with a fingerprint-coded lock and retinal scanners.
Killing the guards at the front gate might have been worth the extra time after all, if only she could be sure that they had the right clearances. The ten minutes that had elapsed since she and her men had slipped past them weren't long enough for a severed hand to cool to the point that it could no longer trigger a biometric lock.
It wouldn't have gotten them past the retinal scan, though. That was what explosives were for.
The padlock gave easily, and blowing the door was scarcely harder. With luck, the bunker's thick concrete walls would muffle the sound of the small explosions.
She could already hear the strangled note in Doom's voice as he grudgingly asked her to please hand over the book.
Sin adjusted her night vision goggles, which she had carefully turned off to avoid being flash-blinded by the explosions, until the world was brightly lit in shades of green again. The two men she had left outside would have cut the power, and the inside of the vault would be as dark as a grave. The SHIELD agents inside would already be on guard, but they would be blind, fumbling uselessly around in the dark.
She drew her gun, stepped to one side to avoid the shots even a blind agent would know to fire at the open doorway, and kicked open the door.
She had a split-second impression of a dozen bodies, far more than the two guards her mole had described, and then the floodlights came on.
The world vanished in a searing flash of light. Sin hit the floor, elbows cracking painfully against concrete, and ripped her goggles off. Her eyes were watering, brightly colored sparks fuzzing across her vision.
"Compromised," the voice in her head snarled. "Our agent was turned. Or he has been dead for weeks. Foolish girl, you walked right into their trap."
"Sorry, Daddy," she mumbled, rolling to the side to avoid a burst of gunfire. She should have known better than to trust a contact made after so long a stretch of silence. Sin reached into her pocket and triggered Doom's teleportation device.
Nothing happened.
"Drop your weapons," a hatefully familiar female voice said. "SHIELD is placing all of you under arrest."
Sin aimed her gun in the general direction of Agent Carter's voice and fired, hoping one of her bullets got the bitch in the gut, then crawled backwards for the door, When her left foot hit the lowest step, she turned and launches herself up the stairs, shoving past the men in her way.
Gustave grunted as she ducked past him, then screamed. His blood sprayed warm against her back.
No loss; the man had been a coward anyway. Sacrifices had to be made in the name of the future Reich.
There were two SHIELD agents at the top of the stairs, and another outside the bunker. She didn't even bother to kill them, just put them on the ground as fast as she could and ran. The moment she crossed the bunker's threshold and hit outside air, the stomach-twisting lurch of the teleportation took her.
Doom would be waiting at the other end of the teleport, there to rant at her for her failure. Let him; she would have other chances, and the more he treated her as like an idiot child, the more he would forget to watch for treachery. Burning him alive after she obtained the spear was going to be very satisfying.
Almost as satisfying as killing every SHIELD agent she could find would be.
* * *
"You're pronouncing it wrong," Hank said, not looking up from the computer screen he was squinting at. "Come over here and tell me if these look the same to you."
Clint obediently bent over Hank's shoulder and examined the screen, where four rows of brightly colored CGI DNA strands were slowly revolving. "That bit there is in all of them except the last one. Are you cloning something again? Because if you are, Thor's going to kill you and none of the rest of us will try to stop him."
"Ha." Hank smacked a fist into his palm, grinning. "Beast is a genius. I am a genius."
"So what is it?" Clint prodded. "What's it medication for?"
Hank didn't seem to hear him; his face had lit up in a wide grin that would have been endearing if it didn't bring to mind evil robots, hoards of creepy-crawly things, and plans that went terribly, disastrously wrong. "I tried comparing mutant DNA to normal human DNA — just the sequences containing the X genes, to cut down on the computer processing time — and it kept throwing up false matches. And then I looked at the CAT scans Beast did on some of the X-Men to map the regions of the brain that control the use of mutant powers, and the chemical process that occurs when energy mutants convert biological energy to electrical-magnetic or kinetic energy, and there were a lot of very familiar neurotransmitters there. Did you ever wonder why Pym particles never took on you the way they did on the rest of us who used them?"
The question was so far out of left field that Clint nearly answered it by reflex, despite the fact that had nothing to do with what he was trying to talk about, but Hank didn't give him a chance. "That's you," he said, waving at the bottom line of DNA. "That's Wanda," the top one, "these two in the middle are me and Jan, and that" he tapped the color-coded pattern that appeared in every row but Clint's, "is the portion of the X genome sequence that encodes the potential for mutant powers. It's less well known than this part," he indicated another section of DNA, which looked only slightly different from the first, and only appeared in Wanda's row, "which controls the expression of powers. It was the first X gene sequence discovered, the one isolated back in the sixties by Xavier and a bunch of scientists whose names you wouldn't recognize, the part the Legacy Virus targets. No one but Sinister managed to isolate the second part until Beast started researching Legacy. It's recessive, which means that a certain percentage of the population are carriers for the gene without being mutants themselves." All of this came out in a rush, as if Hank had been waiting for the opportunity to share it with someone for hours or days.
"That's great, Hank." Clint drew a deep breath in through his nose, and reminded himself that he really did like Hank. "I'm really glad I'm not a mutant and you and Jan are some kind half mutants or something. What's the medication for?"
Hank's grin got even wider. "You actually understand what I'm talking about? I wasn't sure you would. It's a mild prescription painkiller and sedative," he added, "it's a prescribed for a lot of things."
Well, that was significantly less dramatic than Clint had expected. "Are you sure?" he asked.
Hank nodded enthusiastically. "I need to run more tests to be sure, but I know I'm right. Six people who've gained the ability to biologically produce Pym particles, and Scott and Cassie and Bill and his nephew are blood relatives. They have to be carriers for the gene, too." He frowned down at the screen for a second, tapping his fingers on the edge of the keyboard. "I wish I had some more DNA samples. Peter's the only other non-mutant superhuman sample I have, and some of his genetic material doesn't even look human. I can't tell if he's a carrier for a recessive power-encoding X sequence or not. It can't just be Pym particles, though." He looked back up at Clint, eyes bright and intent. "I think it's everything. All of us. Like unified field theory for superpowers. Steve has it, and I bet if I tested the Bradleys, they'd both come up positive, and Dr. Hansen's promised to send me the data on the junk DNA that allows the extremis to-" he broke off, as if suddenly realizing that Clint didn't care about his amazing DNA discovery. "You don't look excited. I just figured out how to genetically test for the potential to acquire superpowers. Why aren't you excited?"
"Because that's the creepiest 1984 thing I've ever heard of," Clint told him honestly. It was bad enough that you could test for a normal X gene. Testing for anybody that might possibly be able to have powers was like one of those anti-superhuman crazies' wet dreams. "So it's just painkillers and not, I don't know, something really heavy-duty? That they give you when you have cancer or inoperable brain tumors or something?"
"They prescribe it for all kinds of things; how should I know?" Hank frowned, something finally penetrating his mad scientist glee. "Why are you so interested in this?"
"No reason," Clint said hurriedly. Don was probably right, he realized. If Tony wanted half the team to know he had some kind of medical condition again, he'd have told them himself, and he probably wouldn't appreciate Clint going around behind his back and telling everybody, any more than he and Wanda wanted everyone to know what had happened between them in Transia.
Hank was staring at him now, inspecting Clint as if he were a lab experiment. "Clint, are you all right? Did Wanda screw up somehow when she brought you back?"
"Not as far as I know, but thank you for giving me something else to worry about."
"They don't give you prescription pain medication for no reason. And why are you letting some doctor prescribe you things without asking what they are?"
"I'm not. I just heard the name somewhere and was curious." Clint offered, knowing it sounded exactly like the lie it was.
Hank went still, the last traces of that manic enthusiasm draining out of his posture. Or maybe it was just normal science enthusiasm. Either way, it was gone now. "What's wrong with you?"
"It's not for me, okay?" Clint snapped, giving up on discretion. "I found a prescription for it in Tony's lab. Don wouldn't tell me what it was, so I asked you."
Hank rubbed one hand over his face, sighing. "If you'd told me it was for Tony, I wouldn't have told you, either," he said, the words muffled by his fingers. "If he wanted you to know what medication he was taking and why and what it was for he would tell you himself." His fingers froze, and he looked back up at Clint, frown deeper now. "And on that note, how much talking do the rest of you guys do about me behind my back?"
"A lot. All we ever do is talk about you." Hank didn't rise to the bait, so Clint went on, "I was worried. I thought maybe there was something wrong with him. And it wasn't like he was going to tell us; we wouldn't have found out until he passed out on the Senate floor or fell out of the sky during a fight or something."
"And so when Don wouldn't gossip with you about your teammate's personal medical information, you figured you come ask me?"
"I'd have googled it, but I couldn't remember how to spell it." Google searches on medical stuff always seemed to turn up as many ads and weird homeopathic remedies as they did actual information, anyway.
"So said to yourself, 'I know; I'll ask Hank,'" Hank said, in that bitchy voice he used when he was being snide to people, usually Clint. "'He doesn't have any professional ethics.'"
"Well, you kind of don't."
Hank's eyes narrowed. "That's not true," he snapped.
"I didn't mean it that way," Clint lied. "You're not a doctor. You haven't taken the Hippocratic oath."
"You meant it exactly that way. Why do people always act like my experiments go wrong on purpose?" Hank flung his hands out, narrowly missing knocking over a test tube full of god knew what.
It was probably DNA-related, Clint told himself. Hank would be more careful if his workspace were covered in poisons, acid, or some kind of bioweapon. If nothing else, he'd never have something corrosive so close to a computer.
He sounded legitimately hurt, though. "It's not so much that they all go wrong," Clint said reassuringly, "as it is that on the rare occasions when they do, the results always try to kill us."
Hank folded his arms, staring down at his computer screen. "It's not like I want them to. I didn't even want to do the experiments with Thor's clone; they were the least disturbing option out of an entire list of unethical experiments. The scientist they had me working with under the Initiative was dissecting and cloning dead teenagers without their parents' knowledge."
Clint held a hand up, cutting him off. "You don't have to rant at me; I sat through all those hearings, too. But I have to say, the more I hear about that program from you and Jan, the more I see why Steve was so freaked out by it." There were parts of it that sounded like a good idea, like giving superhumans some kind of official training, and locking supervillains up somewhere they couldn't escape from every other week, but they were vastly outnumbered by the blatantly horrible parts. Like pardoning Norman Osborn and putting him in charge of the Thunderbolts, which only someone heavily bribed with Oscorp money could ever think was a good idea.
"You do realize what those people would do with your X-gene research, right?" he asked. "Not all of them have been impeached or suspended."
Hank's frown had shifted from irritated to stubborn. "I'm not going to drop or suppress a line of scientific inquiry just because the results could be used badly. All science can be used badly."
He had a point, but still... "Maybe you and Beast should talk to the rest of the X-Men before you publish any of it, just in case. Or to Jan. Or anyone who's not each other, Tony, or Reed Richards."
"Jan suggested the Pym particles angle in the first place." Hank shook his head, and tapped the computer screen with two fingers. "I don't think you're really grasping how revolutionary this could be. It's too big to sit on. It's also months away from being ready for any kind of publication. Less than a dozen test subjects is far too small a sample to reliably extrapolate from, and..."
When Hank was on a roll, he didn't need any input from anyone else in the room in order to keep going. After a while, Clint didn't even bother to make interested noises. Unless he actually fell asleep, Hank wasn't likely to notice.
Hank was having good luck with his research — amazingly good luck, if this gene thing was actually as big a discovery as Hank thought it was — and didn't have any immediate plans to hand it over to the government or build killer robots with it, and whatever was wrong with Tony, it wasn't the near-disaster that would utterly shatter Cap and destroy the team that Clint had been afraid of.
It looked like Wanda's ominous card readings were nothing but the chaos-induced coincidence she'd said they were.
* * *
Sometime over the past few weeks, it had turned cold. Barely October, and it was already only fifty degrees — and from a couple hundred feet up, with nothing to block the wind, it was even colder.
Jan rubbed at her arms, and wished the new, weatherproof and silk-lined version of her costume had been ready last night. Hank hadn't gotten around to infusing it with Pym particles yet, still too busy dissecting the remains of Thursday's giant squid and pouring over his recessive X-gene carrier theory to have time for anything else.
"It looks so innocent from up here." Carol's voice sounded through her communicator, sharp and clear and without the wind noise that most sound equipment wouldn't be able to filter out. There were benefits to having Tony Stark design your tech. "How long is Cap going to have us doing this?"
St. Margaret's Cathedral was directly below them now, looking as benign as any of the hundreds of churches in the city. The tree planted in its small scrap of churchyard was already a winter-bare skeleton, giving Jan a clear view of the side of the building.
It looked normal, quiet and shut up like just about any church would be on a Saturday afternoon. She couldn't feel anything out of the ordinary, either, though why she should have expected to, Jan didn't know. Wanda was the one who was sensitive to those sorts of things, which was one of the reasons why they had decided to put her back in the field. Carol had a better chance of picking something up than Jan did; her powers were energy based, and chaos magic was, after all, a kind of energy.
"Until something happens, or Strange figures out a way to get Chthon out of there. Can you feel anything? Any energy coming from the building?"
There was a long pause. "No," Carol said, slowly. "I don't think so. But it wouldn't be normal energy. For all I know, the whole block could be lit up like a Christmas tree with magical radiation."
"Never mind," Jan told her. "It was just a thought."
"Although... I could feel Wanda's power, when she threw hex spheres, and when she created that spell circle at Mount Rushmore. Maybe Chthon is hiding."
Jan shook her head — uselessly, since Carol was ahead and to the left of her, and couldn't see the gesture. "If he's hiding, I don't want to think about what it will be like when he stops hiding. Train wrecks, two collapsed buildings, a gas main explosion, that squid... and Tony thinks the air traffic control mix up at JKR yesterday was his influence, too."
That one, thankfully, had been resolved by the pilots and ground crew without serious incident. The squid had been another matter entirely. It had taken an entire afternoon to drive it back into New York Harbor, and Spiderman had insisted repeatedly that there were more of them under there, saying that his Spider-sense had been crawling for days.
The original squid had washed up against a pier in New Jersey yesterday, dead, with the two tentacles Spiderman had stabbed with his stingers reduced to rotting masses of necrotized flesh, so even though his wrist had swelled up to the size of a baseball due to an allergic reaction to its slime, Jan privately voted him the victor. His previous anxiety over whether or not he was growing to grow squid arms as a result of the reaction had now shifted to worrying that the squid might have been sentient. Hank, still occupied with dissecting it, had assured him that it wasn't. Spiderman, as it turned out, was difficult to reassure, and Hank's best efforts hadn't exactly helped matters.
It had taken all of Jan' powers of persuasion to keep him from asking the poor kid for a tissue sample from his wrist. 'He has venom sacs in there' Hank had insisted. 'Probably producing a toxin similar to Brown Recluse venom.'
He had been wearing one of his old lab coats, his hair uncombed and the lower half of his face covered in blond stubble, looking every bit the scruffy, abstracted scientist he'd been when Jan had first seen him in her father's lab. Hank had no idea how cute he looked when he was all fired up with the joy of scientific discovery; numerous attempts to inform him of the fact had never seemed to penetrate.
He'd been so absorbed in gene sequencing and neurochemistry data and toxin analysis that it had taken barely any persuasion to get him to promise not to discuss the X-gene theory with anyone other than his fellow Avengers and Beast.
Thank god. The implications of his theory were frightening, enough that Jan preferred not to think about them. The squid's partially decomposed tissue samples were almost a relief in comparison.
"We need to drive him out of there," Carol muttered, low enough that Jan wasn't sure she was intended to hear it. "Get rid of him. Maybe we should have talked to Loki."
"There's no arguing that." The wind stung her exposed skin, and her fingers were slowly going numb; she lost heat faster at this size. "I've tried suggesting that Thor call her. He won't listen to me or to Sam or Wanda, or even to Cap. Neither will Don." Now that Victor von Doom was involved in the situation, the odds against them had worsened considerably. A chaos deity ace-in-the-hole no longer seemed like such a bad idea; even Hank was willing to reconsider working with her.
"He doesn't trust her," Carol said. "I don't blame him. Neither do I."
They had left the cathedral behind and were nearing the West Side Highway and the river now, brownstones, storefronts, and office buildings slowly being replaced by warehouses. Time to turn around for one last sweep over the area. It never hurt to be thorough.
Tony had a spy satellite watching the cathedral, and several street level cameras planted around the block, filming in infrared as well as visible light, plus a network of hacked traffic cameras, but the ambient chaos energy made them unreliable, the feeds prone to cutting in and out and half the data corrupted. And he couldn't monitor them 24/7 with the Extremis anymore, which meant that instead of seamless round-the-clock surveillance, they had a computer program designed to register "unusual activity" and set off an alert.
Sam had his own eyes in the sky, and Hank had a tiny army crawling all over the outside of the building, but computers, birds, and ants weren't people. They missed things, sometimes dangerous, important things.
Steve had ordered daily fly-overs of Hell's Kitchen, just in case, and had even managed to get Daredevil to agree to report any disturbances in the area to the Avengers, via Luke Cage or Spiderman.
Daredevil was territorial about Hell's Kitchen — the fact that he was accepting help in patrolling the area was not a reassuring sign.
The cathedral looked just as benign the second time around, but this time the bare branches of the tree caught Jan's eye. The trees in Central Park were still a riot of fall color.
Was Chthon's hand at work there, or was she reading too much into things?
"The big guy doesn't like it when people betray him," Jan said. "He takes it personally."
"I can sympathize. It's still weird to see Wanda in the Avengers Mansion, but if I can work with her — hell, if Clint can work with her — Thor can suck it up and talk to his stepbrother. And the rest of us, too."
Jan's response was cut off by a loud squeal of brakes from below, and she tracked it to its source just in time to see a car slam into a parked SUV with a loud, metallic crunch. It rebounded off the SUV, side-swiped the car parked illegally on the other side of the street, and came to a halt in the middle of the street. Several feet away, its crumpled front fender spun lazily over the asphalt.
The whole thing happened in seconds, too swiftly for Jan or Carol to intervene.
Jan dove lower, mentally preparing herself for the dizzy head rush that always ensued when she tried to grow immediately after returning to normal size from her Wasp form. If necessary, she and Carol could rip the doors off the car, get the driver out before—
The driver's-side door popped open, and the driver leaped out and began running down the street. Directly into Carol, who landed in his path, arms folded over her chest.
"Leaving the scene of an accident is a crime, you know," she said, voice mild.
"Jesus fuck, my car!" a man wailed. The black Mercedes that the driver had hit after bouncing off the SUV had probably cost more than most people made in a year. Now, with both passenger-side doors crumpled in, it was just a very expensive insurance claim.
Jan returned to full size just before she landed, putting herself between the Mercedes owner and the driver — now struggling futilely in Carol's grasp. "Has anyone called the police yet, or do I need to?" she asked. This was ridiculous — traffic accidents were not supposed to be the kind of thing superheroes dealt with — but they'd been right there, and jumping in had been instinctive.
Calling the police, as it turned out, wasn't necessary. They arrived on the scene only moments later, sirens quiet but lights on, arrested the driver, and began taking witness statements. Apparently, the driver had been fleeing from the scene of the crime after robbing a drug store on 8th avenue.
No wonder Spiderman was so mouthy all the time; he had to deal with criminals this stupid on a regular basis.
Of course, it wasn't necessarily bad driving on the would-be robber's part that had caused this. According to the police databases and radio frequencies Tony had been watching, traffic accidents were yet another thing that had increased in the vicinity of the cathedral, like muggings, domestic violence calls, and a bunch of other petty, every-day evils that superheroes could do nothing to stop.
Carol was right; they had to do something about Chthon. Waiting around in the hopes that they could stop him whenever he finally made his move was already costing the city too much.
At least no one had died in this accident. The subway passengers last week had not been so lucky.
The flight back to Stark Tower was uneventful, if even colder than before. By the time they were over Times Square, Jan had lost all feeling in her fingers and toes. Hank was either treating her winter gloves and boots with Pym particles tonight, or he was sleeping in his lab. Which would probably be a more effective threat if he didn't frequently do that anyway, because he'd worked on something non-stop until he crashed.
If he didn't come up for air tonight, she was going to the Mansion to fetch him. It was always a bad sign when Hank stopped sleeping.
"I hate to say it," Carol said, so softly that the communicator only just picked it up, "but in some ways, the city might be better off if she hadn't come back." She didn't need to specify who 'she' was. "Except... I would never want her to stay trapped, not like that. But if what happened when she destroyed the mansion is anything to go by, things are going to get a lot worse."
Thor was not the only one who needed to suck it up and deal with things. Jan executed a fast turn, hovering just in front of where Carol's face was going to be in about thirty-seconds. "She was possessed, Carol," she said flatly. "She had no choice about any of what she did. How is it different from when Vision was controlled by the Ultron protocols, or when Tony and I were poisoned by AIM? I could have hurt someone then. Tony could have killed someone — if Steve hadn't been able to talk him down out of the armor, he would have." She jabbed a finger at Carol, the motion making her dip slightly in the air. "Her brother is God knows where, her father tried to use her to destroy the world, and her husband is dead. Leave her alone."
"That's not what I meant," Carol snapped, holding up gloved palms defensively. She was hovering, too, now, the ground dozens of feet below them. "Jesus, what kind of grudge-holding bitch do you think I am? I understand that it wasn't her fault. I get it. I'm over blaming her. I just don't want Chthon to use her like some puppet again and destroy the city in the process."
"Really? You got over something?" She sounded bitchy, she knew, not at all the way the co-leader of the Avengers should sound when talking to a teammate about her inability to get along with another teammate. Carol and Wanda had been friends, once, but now Carol seemed just as resentful of Wanda as Spider-Woman had been toward Carol after she had sided with Tony and joined the pro-Registration heroes. Except this one probably wasn't going to be resolved by a threesome with Simon.
"You sound like Jessica," Carol muttered. "I know it wasn't her fault," she repeated, more calmly this time. "Cap told me. Tony told me. Simon and Jessica told me. Clint told me. Even Wanda told me. And then Clint... Chthon hurt her, while he was in her head. Used her body to do things. It's not her fault. It's ours, for not stopping it."
Below them, people on the sidewalk were starting to stop and stare. They were too far up for their voices to be audible, but the faint honking of car horns drifting up from stopped traffic could just be heard.
"Come on," Jan said. "Let's find somewhere else to talk."
The penthouse at Stark Tower was empty — Sam and Jarvis long since jumped ship to the now-completed Avengers Mansion, Hank was nowhere to be found, probably still buried in one lab or the other, and Thor was gone, too. Either he or Don was probably back in Oklahoma. They both had responsibilities there.
This, Jan felt, was a conversation that called for ice cream. She brought a pint of Haagen Daaz and two bowls out from the kitchen, offering one to Carol, who was sitting on the shorter of the living room's two couches, her arms folded.
Carol shook her head. "I don't have an energy mutant's metabolism."
Jan raised her eyebrows. "No, you have Kree metabolism, which is even better. I hate you and Jen sometimes. It's one of the perils of being short; five pounds looks like ten on me." She set the bowls to one side and dug her spoon straight into the ice cream; it wasn't as if anyone else ate it, anyway, with Spiderman and Jessica Jones no longer staying in the tower. Thor, who was better at respecting labels on food than most, never touched her ice cream.
"I was so angry at her," Carol said, after a long silence during which Jan dug all the pecans out of the top layer of ice cream. "I thought she'd put Clint under mind control. Tony and Jen, too. Lot of us have had bad things happen to us. The rest of us didn't try to destroy us all over it. And then... M Day scared me. Taking away people's powers, turning mutants back into normal people. There are people who'd like to do that to me. To take away what I felt for Jessica, what I still feel, and make me a good little woman who does what she's supposed to. Because they think the world would be better that way."
"It wasn't her," Jan repeated. If she said it often enough, eventually she would stop watching Wanda uneasily for signs of... something. She wasn't even sure exactly what, only that people who had been broken once could break again, usually in the same places. But possession was external, the work of an outside force, something you could guard against and fight.
Carol shook her head. "I know that now. It doesn't actually make it easier. How long did it take before you wanted to be in the same room as Hank again?"
"That's different." Jan set the ice cream container down, hard. "That was Hank."
Carol met her eyes, her face serious. "But he wasn't in control, any more than she was. Any more than Tony or I were when we were drinking. And anyone who loses control like that once can do it again."
"We're not talking about Hank."
"No," Carol agreed, "we're talking about Wanda. We screwed up, big time. We should have gone to get her as soon as Clint came back and we knew where she was. We shouldn't have let Chthon take her in the first place. But we did, and he did, and if he gets his hooks into her again, he could turn Manhattan into a smocking crater."
Jan shook her head, reaching for the ice cream again. "He won't. Strange took care of that."
"He shouldn't have had to," Carol said, frowning. "We should have helped her. I should have helped her. She tried to help me. But then Vision, and Clint, and... I wanted to leave her to rot. And all the time, he was doing things to her, with her." Her voice faltered on the last, leaving no doubt as to what kind of 'things' she meant.
"We don't know that," Jan said quickly. It was true, she didn't know for sure, but… Clint must have slept with Wanda in Transia, while she had been under Chthon's control, probably while Clint was under mind control, too. That, or something very close to it. Nothing else that Jan could think of would explain the way Carol kept being so deliberately vague about exactly what unknown but terrible things Chthon had done to Wanda, when it wasn't like Carol to dance around something. Not to mention the weird, guilty look in Clint's eyes whenever he looked at her, and Carol's previous fierce conviction that Wanda had hurt Clint in some way that clearly seemed worse to her than even his temporary death.
"Neither does she, other than that he used her to manipulate Clint." 'Manipulate,' another vague word. Carol rubbed at her arms for a moment, the gesture understated enough that it was probably unconscious. She had taken her gloves off, though her mask was still on, and Jan could see her bitten-off nails, one of them torn halfway across the nail bed where she had broken it moving pieces of rubble. If she offered to loan her a pair of nail scissors, or the name of a good manicurist, Carol would probably look at her blankly and turn her down.
"That makes it worse," Carol added, and if Jan had still not believed her insistence that she didn't blame Wanda anymore, the odd, subdued note in her voice would have convinced her.
Not knowing probably did make it worse. If you knew, you at least knew exactly how bad it had been. Missing time, when anything at all could have happened, and might have, would be even more frightening.
Jan nodded, slowly. "What made you change your mind? I thought you were angrier at her than any of us." Tony had blamed himself. Steve too, in a quieter sort of way. Simon hadn't wanted to discuss it, and those first few weeks immediately afterwards, Hank had alternated between trying — endlessly and aloud — to figure out how they could have prevented Ultron from taking over Vision and shutting himself in his lab and speaking only to his specimen tanks. Carol had laid all the blame squarely at Wanda's feet.
Carol looked down at her hands. "Clint told me some things about what happened in Transia. I didn't want to listen, at first, but..." She looked back up, a rueful little smile on her lips. "I owe her an apology. God, that's going to be fun. What am I going to say, 'I wanted to believe you were evil because I liked you and then you hurt my feelings?'
"By liked, do you mean..." Jan gestured vaguely with her spoon. Asking felt weird, intrusive. She was never quite sure when she ought to acknowledge Carol's sexuality, and when she ought to ignore it because it was supposed to be no big deal. Carol herself seemed occasionally unsure; she'd never actually said anything about it to the press, despite not doing anything to hide her relationship with Simon and Jessica from the public eye. In some ways, it was easier with Steve and Tony; before The Article, everyone had acknowledged their relationship to other superheroes and denied it to reporters, just the way you did someone's secret identity, and afterwards, Steve had been very insistent on never concealing or tiptoing around anything, to the point of delivering an embarrassing lecture on acceptance and tolerance if you tried.
Carol shrugged, tucking a piece of hair behind one ear. "If there hadn't been... a lot of missed opportunities, the two of us could have-um..." She waved her hands in an equally vague gesture.
"Had wild lesbian sex?" Jan guessed.
Carol's ears and cheeks flushed pink. "I wouldn't go that far, but-" she broke off, then, "Give me the ice cream," she said, abruptly, grabbing for one of the abandoned bowls.
"I've been eating it straight out of the carton," Jan said, tilting the top of carton towards her.
"I'm immune to most human viruses. It's a Kree thing." She didn't look at Jan while she served herself ice-cream — half of what remained in the carton, which was probably a good thing for Jan's thighs. "Right before the end, if I had stayed after Red Zone. Before that, either I wasn't on the team or she was with Simon, or I was still drinking. It was always something. I never expected anything like what happened. It felt... personal. Stupid, I know, but-"
"No," Jan said. "I know what that's like. You used to have a crush on her, and then she betrayed us, and the fact that part of you wanted to forgive her just because she was staring at you with those big blue eyes and looking all wounded made you even angrier."
"Wanda's eyes are brown," Carol said. Which wasn't really an answer, but in a way, was.
"That's not the point." Jan pointed her ice cream spoon at Carol again. "The point is that you feel guilty because she needed help and you didn't notice in time to stop it, or couldn't stop it. And the fact that she did terrible things makes it even more complicated, because you did have a legitimate reason to be angry, and where's the line between understanding and forgiving and condoning?" She'd asked herself that dozens of times, every time she had to justify to someone else why she'd chosen to go back to Hank. 'Because I love him,' wasn't enough, not after everything that had happened between them. "And you keep asking yourself if you could have prevented those things by noticing or helping sooner, if you made it worse. And sometimes it's easier to get angry than admit that there's nothing you can do to go back and fix things."
Carol was silent for a long moment. Maybe she had said too much, made it too much about herself. She didn't talk about her marriage — former marriage — to her teammates very often for a reason. It made things awkward, even with people who didn't know why it had ended.
"It's killing Simon," Carol said, finally, and Jan relaxed inwardly at the change of subject. "He still loves her, you know. More as a friend than anything else, but... he loves her. I know he wants to talk to her, but I think he still blames her for Vision dying and feels guilty for it. Simon doesn't like emotional confrontation." She smiled a little, just for a moment. "I think Jessica and I wore him out sometimes, honestly." Then the smile faded, and she added, quietly, "I don't know if he's afraid that she isn't really Wanda anymore, or that she is."
"You've told him she is, though." She didn't make it a question.
Carol bit at her lower lip for a second, then blew out a long breath. "Yes. I know he wants to believe it. Hell, I want to believe it. Everything in Transia was definitely Chthon, maybe all of it was even Chthon. M Day..." she made a face. "I can't imagine the Wanda we knew before or Wanda now doing something like that, but if she wanted to hurt Magneto, it was probably the worst thing anyone could possibly do to him. To Pietro. And Wanda had good reasons for being angry at them, for wanting to punish them." She took a bite of ice cream, then, "It didn't have to be about them at all, though. There are lots of reasons why Chthon might want to cut down the world's mutant population. But the things she did to us. Making Jen lose control and Hulk out, pushing Tony off the wagon, bringing Ultron back... Chthon doesn't care about us. We're insects to him. How would he know exactly where to hit to hurt us so badly? So personally?"
It had the sound of something she'd worried over for a long time, and Jan suspected that these weren't just Simon's concerns she was voicing.
Jan shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe he pulled the information from her mind."
"He probably did, but that sounds almost too convenient to be true. I wanted to believe it wasn't her, that she wouldn't do that to us, and so I couldn't trust the part of me that wanted to believe her, especially not when everyone else was accepting it all so easily. Simon doesn't do suspicious well, but if he lets himself believe it's really her, and then it's not... And I can't tell him what Clint told me. There are some things he doesn't need to hear."
"He'll come around eventually," Jan said, trying to sound certain. "And he doesn't need you to be angry for him."
"I'm not." Carol's voice was firm, level. "Not anymore."
"Good," Jan told her, "because Cap and I are keeping her on active status. With things the way they are, we're going to need her. And I don't think the team can take having two more people in the field who won't talk to each other. Hank and Tony and Thor are dangerous enough already."
Carol snorted. "Hank and Tony and Thor are all idiots. There wasn't anything else they could have done, not with the way HUSAC was breathing down our necks. Tony's going to give himself another breakdown if he doesn't stop feeling personally responsible for every single bad thing that happened under the SHRA."
Privately, Jan suspected that if it weren't for the Extremis, Tony would probably benefit from a prescription for anti-depressants. That, or therapy. He'd been barely functional during the endless three months when Steve had been dead and Registration and the Initiative had been in full force, though he'd hidden it well. And it hadn't been that long since Rumiko Fujikawa's death. Two dead lovers in as many years would have screwed up even someone who didn't have Tony's history with depression and self-destructive behavior.
Frankly, they could all probably use a few visits to a therapist, but years of keeping secret identities secret were a hard habit to break. She'd actually had to argue Hank out of just getting a recommendation for medication out of Leonard Samson and then synthesizing his own; during the height of the fight over Registration, before she'd walked away because she couldn't take Bill's death and the fighting and the 1984 levels of creepiness anymore, the government had kept a very close eye on anything that smacked of instability in superhumans. If he'd gone to an Initiative doctor, Hank might have ended up sitting in a cell in his and Tony's own prison.
Tony, thankfully, had found him a discrete, private source for the mood stabilizers and anti-depressants Len had suggested, and some day she was going to have words with Reed Richards about his ridiculous 'you could just make this yourself' suggestion.
Thank God he hadn't gone to a SHIELD psychiatrist. Dr. Faustus had been able to program Sharon Carter into shooting Steve, despite being both his friend and occasional lover for years; she didn't even want to think about what he could have done to Hank.
"The Hank, Tony, and Thor situation will be resolved," she said. "I was trying not to get involved because I couldn't be impartial, but that was when I thought they were going to work it out themselves." Clearly, that assumption had been overly optimistic. Thor wasn't likely to listen to her — she'd been on the pro-registration side, after all — but Hank would.
"Good," Carol said. "Because having Wanda back in the line-up is awkward enough." She put her empty ice cream bowl down, the spoon clinking against the side of the bowl. "What are we going to do if Chthon gets to her again?"
Jan ran a finger slowly around the rim of the ice cream carton, the waxed cardboard smooth and slightly sticky. After a moment of deliberate silence, she met Carol's eyes. "Whatever we have to."
* * *
Chapter One | . . . | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen, part one | Chapter Fourteen, part two | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Epilogue
Not 100% happy with some of the scenes in this chapter, but it was past time we just posted it already. And on that note:
ITS FINISHED!!! (And it only took three freaking years – god, can we apologize enough?) The entire rest of the fic is now complete and being edited (all 150,000 words of it). Expect weekly updates from now on.
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonUniverse: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work.
Beta:
dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching (most of) our many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Most of the people his age that Clint knew had spent Saturday mornings watching cartoons as kids. He had, too, once, but by the time he'd been a teenager, he'd been getting up early on Saturday mornings to get ready for performances. It had been a decade and a half since then, but he'd never broken the habit.
There was always some part of your equipment that needed cleaning or repairing or replacing. And there were arrows to make; you could never have enough arrows.
Technically, he could have just bought them in bulk from a sports supply store or bow hunting catalog, but Clint preferred to make them to his own specifications. Plus, even online, it was hard to find a supplier that would dye the fletching the right shade of purple.
This morning, he'd settled down in the living room, cutting board, exacto knife, and bag of new purple feathers in hand, and started splitting feathers along the quill, sanding the bottoms down and sorting the halves into clockwise and counterclockwise piles. He'd gotten through twenty minutes of Looney Tunes re-runs and halfway through an episode of some cartoon about teenagers with elemental magic when he realized that something was missing.
"Has anybody seen the cat?" Clint asked the room at large.
"No." Carol turned a page in her book, not looking up. "I think it's hiding somewhere. I haven't seen it since yesterday."
Usually he couldn't keep the cat away when he was fletching arrows — the feathers and the sinew he used to bind the fletches on were apparently some kind of cornucopia of cat delight, and Matt/Patton/Churchill would sit inches from his feet and stare at him with huge, crazed eyes, occasionally reaching up with one questing paw to hook his claws through a loop of sinew or shred a fletch. Then he'd grab a thread of sinew in his teeth and run off to eat it, freezing every few feet to glance back and make sure Clint didn't want to follow him.
"There was food still sitting in his bowl when I got breakfast." Clint frowned down at the feather in his hands. "You don't think he's sick, do you?"
Wanda, laying out tarot cards on the part of the coffee table that wasn't covered in fluffs of purple down and crumbs of that styrofoamy stuff that filled the inside of quill shafts, shook her head. "He's afraid of the Dee manuscript. Redwing won't come in this part of the house, either."
She was sitting on the floor a few feet away from Clint, and when she bent her head to look at the cards, he had a perfect view of the tattoo at the base of her neck. It was weirdly captivating, drawing the eye from the knobs of her spine up to the edge of her hairline.
Clint dropped his eyes back to his hands; Wanda obviously wasn't comfortable with the tattoos, or she wouldn't keep wearing gloves over them. Staring at them felt... invasive.
"I'm going to go look for him," Clint said, standing abruptly and brushing feather barbs off his pants.
Carol gave an absent hum, and turned another page.
"You should leave him alone. He'll come out when he's ready." Wanda swept her cards into a pile with one hand and started shuffling them again, then cut the deck and laid three cards face up.
"The Tower, the Eight of Swords, and the Five of Cups," Clint observed. "That's not good."
She made a face, gathering them up again. "Every spread I do comes out like this. It's statistically impossible. Even I ought to be able to get at least one vaguely positive reading."
"That's... really not good. Should we be worried?"
"Tarot cards don't actually tell you the future, Clint. Don't worry about it. It's not the cards; it's all the ambient chaos. Try flipping a coin ten times in a row and seeing what happens."
"I know they don't tell the future." Clint shrugged, vaguely embarrassed. "I used to work in a carnival." And he'd been up close and personal with demons and gods and magic far more times than anybody should have to be since then. Fortune telling might be ninety percent fakery and telling people what they wanted to hear and ten percent actual mysticism, but getting three sinister-looking cards over and over again couldn't possibly mean anything good.
He was going to need more arrows.
After he made sure the cat wasn't off somewhere chewing through an electrical cord.
The kitchen, the library shelves, and the staircase in the front hall were all cat-less, and so was the monitor room. That left Tony's lab, an endless source of potentially lethal things to destroy.
He'd planned to knock — or, rather, holler through the door — since walking into Tony's work area unannounced could get him either a face full of sparks from some welding project and a rant about safety goggles, or an eye full of Tony and Cap doing something he really didn't need to see. Instead, Clint found the door to the lab partly open, with nothing but silence on the other side.
It was probably safe to go in.
The lab was empty — of people, anyway. The cat was sprawled out across Tony's drafting board, one arm hooked over the top to keep himself from sliding down the incline. Several well-chewed pencils and a shredded blue-print were scattered on the table around him.
"I hope that wasn't important," Clint muttered, grabbing the cat around the middle and draping him over his shoulder. "Come on before you break something expensive."
The cat made an irritated snorting sound and dug his claws into Clint's shoulder blade, hind feet shoving at Clint's chest. His tail thwacked repeatedly against Clint's side, telegraphing annoyance.
There was a single piece of paper in the middle of the drafting board, one edge damp and distinctly chewed-looking. "I bet this was important, too." Clint tried to flatten it out with his free hand, with limited success, and the writing on it caught his eye.
It was a prescription scrip, not a scrap of engineering print-out. A prescription for... Clint squinted at the name, unsure of what it was or even how to pronounce it.
"Hank shouldn't leave these things lying around," he told the cat, picking up the scrip. He was about to shove it into his pocket when he noticed who it was made out for.
Not Henry Pym. Anthony Stark. Which would make sense since this was Tony's lab, but what the hell did he need a prescription for? Hank was the one on two kinds of anti-crazy meds.
Whatever it was, it wasn't likely to be good. Tony didn't go the doctor over normal things like sinus infections; it was always heart surgery and being shot and his armor killing him with electromagnetic fields and experimental poisons that made you hallucinate dead people and other life-or-death or just plain weird things.
That didn't mean this prescription was for one of those things, though. Cap was probably forcing Tony to go to doctors' appointments and other 'good for you' things these days, especially after the poison incident. Cap worried about people; it was what he did.
The cat started to make a low, growling sound of frustration, and thrashed violently in Clint's grasp; he hated being carried or held for more than about sixty-seconds at a time.
"All right, all right, we're leaving the lab of kitty chew toys now. I'll put you down as soon as you're someplace you can't electrocute yourself."
The cat was distinctly ungrateful for Clint's efforts to protect him; the second his paws hit the hallway floor he was gone.
Clint winced; Jarvis wasn't going to be happy when he saw the scratches Matt/Patton/Churchill's claws had left on the shiny new floorboards.
When he heard Jarvis's voice coming from around the corner, he winced again, and considered slapping a foot over the biggest scratch.
"May wanted me to thank you for the tip; we had a lovely time."
"I'm just glad the restaurant is still there." Don's voice, vaguely Midwestern and always deeper than Clint remembered it as — probably because everything sounded high-pitched compared to Thor's rumbling bass. "I think it's been four years since the last time I ate there." He and Jarvis turned the corner, and only a quick side-step on Clint's part kept them from running straight into him.
Don slapped a hand against the wall to steady himself, his cane coming within inches of hitting Clint in the shin. "Sorry," he blurted out. "I didn't know you were there."
Clint shook his head. "It'll teach me not to lurk in hallways. I know what you mean about restaurants closing," he added. "That pizza place by the Met went out of business while I was dead."
"It did?" Don was visibly disappointed. "They were the only place that would still deliver here. And they had that carnivore special with five kinds of meat on it."
Jarvis raised an eyebrow. "I thought they opened while you were... away."
Which was one way to refer to the couple of years after Odin had somehow erased Don out of existence, or separated him from Thor, or... Clint had absolutely no idea how the two of them worked, and never had. It was probably safer just not thinking about it too much.
"Thor liked the carnivore special," Don said, which neatly side-stepped the entire existing and then not existing issue.
Did he remember being dead? Or had he just stopped being at all, after Odin had severed him from Thor, and come back when the Big Guy did?
None of them talked about it, not Thor, not Cap, not Spiderman - who had apparently died and been resurrected with fascinatingly disgusting spinnerets in his wrists while Clint had been gone — and not Clint himself. Cap wouldn't even say the word 'dead'; it was always 'while I was gone,' or 'when I wasn't here,' or 'after I was shot.' Always 'shot,' and never 'killed.' Clint wasn't sure if he avoiding saying it because he didn't like thinking about it, or because of the way Tony and Sam's faces went still and blank whenever you mentioned it.
He'd seen it on the news, when he'd been on his way to Transia; Steve falling, blood dark on the shoulder of his costume, and Sharon going to her knees next to him, and then a crowd of SHIELD personnel swarming in, their bodies blocking the camera shot. Actually being there, the way Sam had, would have been worse.
He didn't know how much of it Steve remembered; more than he did, probably. There had been an explosion — or, no Wanda had been there, with children, and turned her face away from him — and one instant of pain, just long enough for him to think 'This is how Bobbi felt,' and then he'd found himself in London, untouched and alone and knowing, somehow, that a long time had passed.
He wanted to believe he'd been with Bobbi, but if he had, that would mean she was alone now, and if they'd been together, surely she would have come back, too.
"Are you all right?" Jarvis asked.
He was talking to him, Clint realized. Both of them were. "Fine," he said. "Just thinking about something." He was suddenly very conscious of the prescription form in his pocket, for some unknown medication with Tony's name on it.
Don would know what it was for, but he wasn't about to ask him what was wrong with Tony in front of Jarvis. The old guy had been through enough lately, with May's coma and physical therapy; he didn't need to worry about Tony on top of that, especially if it was just something normal and everyday like cold medication.
"Do you have a second?" he asked Don. "There's something I wanted to ask you."
"Sure," Don said, and then there was a long moment of silence while the three of them just stood there.
"Um, just you," Clint clarified.
Jarvis probably assumed that Clint was either going to ask some embarrassing medical question, or talk about his sex life in vivid, over-sharing detail, or both, because he cleared his throat, thanked Don again for the restaurant recommendation, and took his leave.
"If you want," Don said quietly, after Jarvis had left, "I can run the same tests on you that I did on Wanda. If you're worried about dying and coming back, or about being exposed to Chthon in Transia."
"That... wasn't what I was worried about. Well, until just now." The possibility of 'coming back wrong' hadn't even occurred to him. Clint shook the thought off; it was better to not to wonder exactly how Wanda had brought him back, especially since she herself couldn't tell him. "I was kicking the cat out of Tony's work room and found this." He fished the crumpled and ragged-edged piece of paper out of his pocket, and held it out to Don. "It's some kind of prescription scrip. Is it something we should be concerned about?"
Don plucked the paper from Clint's hand and flattened it out, frowning at it. "Huh," he muttered. "He did go see a doctor. Good."
That sounded ominous. "So there is something wrong with him?"
Don looked up again, glanced at Clint's outstretched hand, and pointedly tucked the piece of paper into his shirt pocket. "It's not either of our business."
"Maybe you two don't like each other anymore, but he's still an Avenger. Just tell me whether or not it's serious, okay?"
Don's eyebrows drew together, and for a moment, the stern look in his pale blue eyes was reminiscent of Thor at his most stiff and honorable. "People's medical information is personal, Clint. Go ask Tony if you're so desperate to know."
"He'd say he was fine and lie about it." Which was slightly unfair to Tony, but not by much. He'd managed to hide both a serious heart condition and a steadily worsening drinking problem from the team for months, and back when they'd been on the West Coast, he'd spent all his time hiding behind something mechanical and pretending he was perfectly okay, all the while not meeting anyone's eyes and completely ignoring his hair, beard, clothing, and all the other details of physical appearance and grooming Tony usually devoted what had to be tons of time and money to — he spent more on haircuts alone than Clint spent on archery equipment.
"Which would mean he didn't want you to know," Don shot back.
Clint folded his arms across his chest, and drew himself up to his full height. "I guess you weren't there for the 'we need to support our teammates and help them in their hour of need,' speech Cap gave us all when we first joined the team."
The noble, determined pose never worked as well for him as it did for Cap. Looking unimpressed, Don said, "No, I was there for the 'we'll agree to respect one another's secret identities and not pry into our teammates' private lives' speech that apparently only I remember."
It wasn't prying when your teammate might have something seriously wrong with him.
"Yeah, that was before my time." Clint tried a smile. "Wanda, Pietro and I got the teamwork speech. Repeatedly." Cap had been even bossier back then, and convinced that being five whole years older than everyone else made them all children who needed his wise and experienced guidance. In retrospect, though, even Clint could admit that he and Pietro had been kind of bratty.
Don didn't actually smile, but from the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, that was only because he was trying hard not to. "Ask Tony," he repeated.
"Yeah," Clint agreed. "I will."
Don might have too much in the way of professional ethics to gossip about people's medical records behind their backs, but he wasn't the only Avenger who knew his way around a pharmacy. And professional ethics had never been one of their resident chemistry expert's major concerns.
The low, concrete building looked unimportant from the outside, squatting on the edge of the small collection of white tanks like an afterthought. The door was painted red, with a yellow plastic sign riveted to it proclaiming 'danger: high voltage.'
The guards at the entrance of the compound that wasn't a chemical plant had been easy to slip past, clearly low-levels unaware of the importance of what they were guarding. She had been tempted to take the extra few minutes and kill them, but the guards checked in with the main building by radio every fifteen minutes, and tonight's goal was too important to jeopardize by risking alerting the target just for the sake of a little fun.
She could always slit their throats on the way out.
Sin crouched low as the rotating camera mounted on the corner of the bunker swiveled in her direction, and gestured to the men behind her to do the same. The camera was angled to detect motion at long range; this close to the building, anything less than two feet off the ground was outside its field of view.
If the information her man on the Helicarrier had sent her was correct, Doom's precious manuscript was inside there, under armed guard. If it was, her last remaining mole in SHIELD would have finally outlived his usefulness; Fury would probably dispose of him for her, saving her the necessity of eliminating loose ends.
He hadn't sent her a decent bit of info in weeks, before last night's message. If this didn't pan out, she might kill him just on principle.
If it did, she was going to take great pleasure in informing Doom that she'd managed to locate and obtain the manuscript completely without his aid. He wouldn't be grateful, of course — gratitude was probably beyond him — but he wanted the book badly enough that she might be able to squeeze a 'please' or 'thank-you' out of him. He would hate choking those words out.
Once she brought Doom the book and he located the spell within it that would allow a "mundane" human access to the spear, she would no longer need to tolerate his arrogance. He would send her out to fetch the spear for him, blindly confident in his own cleverness, and she would do some spell-casting of her own.
Doom was not the only one with access to ancient grimoires. Her father had preferred more conventional — and reliable — means of gaining power, but had been wise enough to take advantage of magic when the opportunity arose.
The pages she currently had tucked away in a secure hiding place were the only remains of a book of dark magic her father and a circle of the Nazi high command had discovered during the second world war. They had attempted to use it to summon a demon from hell to unleash against their enemies, and had they not been interrupted by Fury and his damned Commandos, Allied tanks could have been halted at the French border.
Fury had been interfering in the business of his betters long before the creation of SHIELD. He would be the first to die after Carter and Barnes, she decided. Daddy wanted her to save Rogers for last. Sin had no objections to that.
The single spell remaining from that grimoire would let her claim the power of the spear for herself. It wasn't the cosmic cube, lost with her father's first death, but it would do. America would burn — the world would burn — and from the ashes would arise a new order, in her father's image.
Beside her, Gustave gestured impatiently at the building. Sin nodded sharply; they had delayed long enough.
The front door of the bunker was secured by a single rusted padlock. Behind it, there would be a flight of stairs leading downward and another door, this one equipped with a fingerprint-coded lock and retinal scanners.
Killing the guards at the front gate might have been worth the extra time after all, if only she could be sure that they had the right clearances. The ten minutes that had elapsed since she and her men had slipped past them weren't long enough for a severed hand to cool to the point that it could no longer trigger a biometric lock.
It wouldn't have gotten them past the retinal scan, though. That was what explosives were for.
The padlock gave easily, and blowing the door was scarcely harder. With luck, the bunker's thick concrete walls would muffle the sound of the small explosions.
She could already hear the strangled note in Doom's voice as he grudgingly asked her to please hand over the book.
Sin adjusted her night vision goggles, which she had carefully turned off to avoid being flash-blinded by the explosions, until the world was brightly lit in shades of green again. The two men she had left outside would have cut the power, and the inside of the vault would be as dark as a grave. The SHIELD agents inside would already be on guard, but they would be blind, fumbling uselessly around in the dark.
She drew her gun, stepped to one side to avoid the shots even a blind agent would know to fire at the open doorway, and kicked open the door.
She had a split-second impression of a dozen bodies, far more than the two guards her mole had described, and then the floodlights came on.
The world vanished in a searing flash of light. Sin hit the floor, elbows cracking painfully against concrete, and ripped her goggles off. Her eyes were watering, brightly colored sparks fuzzing across her vision.
"Compromised," the voice in her head snarled. "Our agent was turned. Or he has been dead for weeks. Foolish girl, you walked right into their trap."
"Sorry, Daddy," she mumbled, rolling to the side to avoid a burst of gunfire. She should have known better than to trust a contact made after so long a stretch of silence. Sin reached into her pocket and triggered Doom's teleportation device.
Nothing happened.
"Drop your weapons," a hatefully familiar female voice said. "SHIELD is placing all of you under arrest."
Sin aimed her gun in the general direction of Agent Carter's voice and fired, hoping one of her bullets got the bitch in the gut, then crawled backwards for the door, When her left foot hit the lowest step, she turned and launches herself up the stairs, shoving past the men in her way.
Gustave grunted as she ducked past him, then screamed. His blood sprayed warm against her back.
No loss; the man had been a coward anyway. Sacrifices had to be made in the name of the future Reich.
There were two SHIELD agents at the top of the stairs, and another outside the bunker. She didn't even bother to kill them, just put them on the ground as fast as she could and ran. The moment she crossed the bunker's threshold and hit outside air, the stomach-twisting lurch of the teleportation took her.
Doom would be waiting at the other end of the teleport, there to rant at her for her failure. Let him; she would have other chances, and the more he treated her as like an idiot child, the more he would forget to watch for treachery. Burning him alive after she obtained the spear was going to be very satisfying.
Almost as satisfying as killing every SHIELD agent she could find would be.
"You're pronouncing it wrong," Hank said, not looking up from the computer screen he was squinting at. "Come over here and tell me if these look the same to you."
Clint obediently bent over Hank's shoulder and examined the screen, where four rows of brightly colored CGI DNA strands were slowly revolving. "That bit there is in all of them except the last one. Are you cloning something again? Because if you are, Thor's going to kill you and none of the rest of us will try to stop him."
"Ha." Hank smacked a fist into his palm, grinning. "Beast is a genius. I am a genius."
"So what is it?" Clint prodded. "What's it medication for?"
Hank didn't seem to hear him; his face had lit up in a wide grin that would have been endearing if it didn't bring to mind evil robots, hoards of creepy-crawly things, and plans that went terribly, disastrously wrong. "I tried comparing mutant DNA to normal human DNA — just the sequences containing the X genes, to cut down on the computer processing time — and it kept throwing up false matches. And then I looked at the CAT scans Beast did on some of the X-Men to map the regions of the brain that control the use of mutant powers, and the chemical process that occurs when energy mutants convert biological energy to electrical-magnetic or kinetic energy, and there were a lot of very familiar neurotransmitters there. Did you ever wonder why Pym particles never took on you the way they did on the rest of us who used them?"
The question was so far out of left field that Clint nearly answered it by reflex, despite the fact that had nothing to do with what he was trying to talk about, but Hank didn't give him a chance. "That's you," he said, waving at the bottom line of DNA. "That's Wanda," the top one, "these two in the middle are me and Jan, and that" he tapped the color-coded pattern that appeared in every row but Clint's, "is the portion of the X genome sequence that encodes the potential for mutant powers. It's less well known than this part," he indicated another section of DNA, which looked only slightly different from the first, and only appeared in Wanda's row, "which controls the expression of powers. It was the first X gene sequence discovered, the one isolated back in the sixties by Xavier and a bunch of scientists whose names you wouldn't recognize, the part the Legacy Virus targets. No one but Sinister managed to isolate the second part until Beast started researching Legacy. It's recessive, which means that a certain percentage of the population are carriers for the gene without being mutants themselves." All of this came out in a rush, as if Hank had been waiting for the opportunity to share it with someone for hours or days.
"That's great, Hank." Clint drew a deep breath in through his nose, and reminded himself that he really did like Hank. "I'm really glad I'm not a mutant and you and Jan are some kind half mutants or something. What's the medication for?"
Hank's grin got even wider. "You actually understand what I'm talking about? I wasn't sure you would. It's a mild prescription painkiller and sedative," he added, "it's a prescribed for a lot of things."
Well, that was significantly less dramatic than Clint had expected. "Are you sure?" he asked.
Hank nodded enthusiastically. "I need to run more tests to be sure, but I know I'm right. Six people who've gained the ability to biologically produce Pym particles, and Scott and Cassie and Bill and his nephew are blood relatives. They have to be carriers for the gene, too." He frowned down at the screen for a second, tapping his fingers on the edge of the keyboard. "I wish I had some more DNA samples. Peter's the only other non-mutant superhuman sample I have, and some of his genetic material doesn't even look human. I can't tell if he's a carrier for a recessive power-encoding X sequence or not. It can't just be Pym particles, though." He looked back up at Clint, eyes bright and intent. "I think it's everything. All of us. Like unified field theory for superpowers. Steve has it, and I bet if I tested the Bradleys, they'd both come up positive, and Dr. Hansen's promised to send me the data on the junk DNA that allows the extremis to-" he broke off, as if suddenly realizing that Clint didn't care about his amazing DNA discovery. "You don't look excited. I just figured out how to genetically test for the potential to acquire superpowers. Why aren't you excited?"
"Because that's the creepiest 1984 thing I've ever heard of," Clint told him honestly. It was bad enough that you could test for a normal X gene. Testing for anybody that might possibly be able to have powers was like one of those anti-superhuman crazies' wet dreams. "So it's just painkillers and not, I don't know, something really heavy-duty? That they give you when you have cancer or inoperable brain tumors or something?"
"They prescribe it for all kinds of things; how should I know?" Hank frowned, something finally penetrating his mad scientist glee. "Why are you so interested in this?"
"No reason," Clint said hurriedly. Don was probably right, he realized. If Tony wanted half the team to know he had some kind of medical condition again, he'd have told them himself, and he probably wouldn't appreciate Clint going around behind his back and telling everybody, any more than he and Wanda wanted everyone to know what had happened between them in Transia.
Hank was staring at him now, inspecting Clint as if he were a lab experiment. "Clint, are you all right? Did Wanda screw up somehow when she brought you back?"
"Not as far as I know, but thank you for giving me something else to worry about."
"They don't give you prescription pain medication for no reason. And why are you letting some doctor prescribe you things without asking what they are?"
"I'm not. I just heard the name somewhere and was curious." Clint offered, knowing it sounded exactly like the lie it was.
Hank went still, the last traces of that manic enthusiasm draining out of his posture. Or maybe it was just normal science enthusiasm. Either way, it was gone now. "What's wrong with you?"
"It's not for me, okay?" Clint snapped, giving up on discretion. "I found a prescription for it in Tony's lab. Don wouldn't tell me what it was, so I asked you."
Hank rubbed one hand over his face, sighing. "If you'd told me it was for Tony, I wouldn't have told you, either," he said, the words muffled by his fingers. "If he wanted you to know what medication he was taking and why and what it was for he would tell you himself." His fingers froze, and he looked back up at Clint, frown deeper now. "And on that note, how much talking do the rest of you guys do about me behind my back?"
"A lot. All we ever do is talk about you." Hank didn't rise to the bait, so Clint went on, "I was worried. I thought maybe there was something wrong with him. And it wasn't like he was going to tell us; we wouldn't have found out until he passed out on the Senate floor or fell out of the sky during a fight or something."
"And so when Don wouldn't gossip with you about your teammate's personal medical information, you figured you come ask me?"
"I'd have googled it, but I couldn't remember how to spell it." Google searches on medical stuff always seemed to turn up as many ads and weird homeopathic remedies as they did actual information, anyway.
"So said to yourself, 'I know; I'll ask Hank,'" Hank said, in that bitchy voice he used when he was being snide to people, usually Clint. "'He doesn't have any professional ethics.'"
"Well, you kind of don't."
Hank's eyes narrowed. "That's not true," he snapped.
"I didn't mean it that way," Clint lied. "You're not a doctor. You haven't taken the Hippocratic oath."
"You meant it exactly that way. Why do people always act like my experiments go wrong on purpose?" Hank flung his hands out, narrowly missing knocking over a test tube full of god knew what.
It was probably DNA-related, Clint told himself. Hank would be more careful if his workspace were covered in poisons, acid, or some kind of bioweapon. If nothing else, he'd never have something corrosive so close to a computer.
He sounded legitimately hurt, though. "It's not so much that they all go wrong," Clint said reassuringly, "as it is that on the rare occasions when they do, the results always try to kill us."
Hank folded his arms, staring down at his computer screen. "It's not like I want them to. I didn't even want to do the experiments with Thor's clone; they were the least disturbing option out of an entire list of unethical experiments. The scientist they had me working with under the Initiative was dissecting and cloning dead teenagers without their parents' knowledge."
Clint held a hand up, cutting him off. "You don't have to rant at me; I sat through all those hearings, too. But I have to say, the more I hear about that program from you and Jan, the more I see why Steve was so freaked out by it." There were parts of it that sounded like a good idea, like giving superhumans some kind of official training, and locking supervillains up somewhere they couldn't escape from every other week, but they were vastly outnumbered by the blatantly horrible parts. Like pardoning Norman Osborn and putting him in charge of the Thunderbolts, which only someone heavily bribed with Oscorp money could ever think was a good idea.
"You do realize what those people would do with your X-gene research, right?" he asked. "Not all of them have been impeached or suspended."
Hank's frown had shifted from irritated to stubborn. "I'm not going to drop or suppress a line of scientific inquiry just because the results could be used badly. All science can be used badly."
He had a point, but still... "Maybe you and Beast should talk to the rest of the X-Men before you publish any of it, just in case. Or to Jan. Or anyone who's not each other, Tony, or Reed Richards."
"Jan suggested the Pym particles angle in the first place." Hank shook his head, and tapped the computer screen with two fingers. "I don't think you're really grasping how revolutionary this could be. It's too big to sit on. It's also months away from being ready for any kind of publication. Less than a dozen test subjects is far too small a sample to reliably extrapolate from, and..."
When Hank was on a roll, he didn't need any input from anyone else in the room in order to keep going. After a while, Clint didn't even bother to make interested noises. Unless he actually fell asleep, Hank wasn't likely to notice.
Hank was having good luck with his research — amazingly good luck, if this gene thing was actually as big a discovery as Hank thought it was — and didn't have any immediate plans to hand it over to the government or build killer robots with it, and whatever was wrong with Tony, it wasn't the near-disaster that would utterly shatter Cap and destroy the team that Clint had been afraid of.
It looked like Wanda's ominous card readings were nothing but the chaos-induced coincidence she'd said they were.
Sometime over the past few weeks, it had turned cold. Barely October, and it was already only fifty degrees — and from a couple hundred feet up, with nothing to block the wind, it was even colder.
Jan rubbed at her arms, and wished the new, weatherproof and silk-lined version of her costume had been ready last night. Hank hadn't gotten around to infusing it with Pym particles yet, still too busy dissecting the remains of Thursday's giant squid and pouring over his recessive X-gene carrier theory to have time for anything else.
"It looks so innocent from up here." Carol's voice sounded through her communicator, sharp and clear and without the wind noise that most sound equipment wouldn't be able to filter out. There were benefits to having Tony Stark design your tech. "How long is Cap going to have us doing this?"
St. Margaret's Cathedral was directly below them now, looking as benign as any of the hundreds of churches in the city. The tree planted in its small scrap of churchyard was already a winter-bare skeleton, giving Jan a clear view of the side of the building.
It looked normal, quiet and shut up like just about any church would be on a Saturday afternoon. She couldn't feel anything out of the ordinary, either, though why she should have expected to, Jan didn't know. Wanda was the one who was sensitive to those sorts of things, which was one of the reasons why they had decided to put her back in the field. Carol had a better chance of picking something up than Jan did; her powers were energy based, and chaos magic was, after all, a kind of energy.
"Until something happens, or Strange figures out a way to get Chthon out of there. Can you feel anything? Any energy coming from the building?"
There was a long pause. "No," Carol said, slowly. "I don't think so. But it wouldn't be normal energy. For all I know, the whole block could be lit up like a Christmas tree with magical radiation."
"Never mind," Jan told her. "It was just a thought."
"Although... I could feel Wanda's power, when she threw hex spheres, and when she created that spell circle at Mount Rushmore. Maybe Chthon is hiding."
Jan shook her head — uselessly, since Carol was ahead and to the left of her, and couldn't see the gesture. "If he's hiding, I don't want to think about what it will be like when he stops hiding. Train wrecks, two collapsed buildings, a gas main explosion, that squid... and Tony thinks the air traffic control mix up at JKR yesterday was his influence, too."
That one, thankfully, had been resolved by the pilots and ground crew without serious incident. The squid had been another matter entirely. It had taken an entire afternoon to drive it back into New York Harbor, and Spiderman had insisted repeatedly that there were more of them under there, saying that his Spider-sense had been crawling for days.
The original squid had washed up against a pier in New Jersey yesterday, dead, with the two tentacles Spiderman had stabbed with his stingers reduced to rotting masses of necrotized flesh, so even though his wrist had swelled up to the size of a baseball due to an allergic reaction to its slime, Jan privately voted him the victor. His previous anxiety over whether or not he was growing to grow squid arms as a result of the reaction had now shifted to worrying that the squid might have been sentient. Hank, still occupied with dissecting it, had assured him that it wasn't. Spiderman, as it turned out, was difficult to reassure, and Hank's best efforts hadn't exactly helped matters.
It had taken all of Jan' powers of persuasion to keep him from asking the poor kid for a tissue sample from his wrist. 'He has venom sacs in there' Hank had insisted. 'Probably producing a toxin similar to Brown Recluse venom.'
He had been wearing one of his old lab coats, his hair uncombed and the lower half of his face covered in blond stubble, looking every bit the scruffy, abstracted scientist he'd been when Jan had first seen him in her father's lab. Hank had no idea how cute he looked when he was all fired up with the joy of scientific discovery; numerous attempts to inform him of the fact had never seemed to penetrate.
He'd been so absorbed in gene sequencing and neurochemistry data and toxin analysis that it had taken barely any persuasion to get him to promise not to discuss the X-gene theory with anyone other than his fellow Avengers and Beast.
Thank god. The implications of his theory were frightening, enough that Jan preferred not to think about them. The squid's partially decomposed tissue samples were almost a relief in comparison.
"We need to drive him out of there," Carol muttered, low enough that Jan wasn't sure she was intended to hear it. "Get rid of him. Maybe we should have talked to Loki."
"There's no arguing that." The wind stung her exposed skin, and her fingers were slowly going numb; she lost heat faster at this size. "I've tried suggesting that Thor call her. He won't listen to me or to Sam or Wanda, or even to Cap. Neither will Don." Now that Victor von Doom was involved in the situation, the odds against them had worsened considerably. A chaos deity ace-in-the-hole no longer seemed like such a bad idea; even Hank was willing to reconsider working with her.
"He doesn't trust her," Carol said. "I don't blame him. Neither do I."
They had left the cathedral behind and were nearing the West Side Highway and the river now, brownstones, storefronts, and office buildings slowly being replaced by warehouses. Time to turn around for one last sweep over the area. It never hurt to be thorough.
Tony had a spy satellite watching the cathedral, and several street level cameras planted around the block, filming in infrared as well as visible light, plus a network of hacked traffic cameras, but the ambient chaos energy made them unreliable, the feeds prone to cutting in and out and half the data corrupted. And he couldn't monitor them 24/7 with the Extremis anymore, which meant that instead of seamless round-the-clock surveillance, they had a computer program designed to register "unusual activity" and set off an alert.
Sam had his own eyes in the sky, and Hank had a tiny army crawling all over the outside of the building, but computers, birds, and ants weren't people. They missed things, sometimes dangerous, important things.
Steve had ordered daily fly-overs of Hell's Kitchen, just in case, and had even managed to get Daredevil to agree to report any disturbances in the area to the Avengers, via Luke Cage or Spiderman.
Daredevil was territorial about Hell's Kitchen — the fact that he was accepting help in patrolling the area was not a reassuring sign.
The cathedral looked just as benign the second time around, but this time the bare branches of the tree caught Jan's eye. The trees in Central Park were still a riot of fall color.
Was Chthon's hand at work there, or was she reading too much into things?
"The big guy doesn't like it when people betray him," Jan said. "He takes it personally."
"I can sympathize. It's still weird to see Wanda in the Avengers Mansion, but if I can work with her — hell, if Clint can work with her — Thor can suck it up and talk to his stepbrother. And the rest of us, too."
Jan's response was cut off by a loud squeal of brakes from below, and she tracked it to its source just in time to see a car slam into a parked SUV with a loud, metallic crunch. It rebounded off the SUV, side-swiped the car parked illegally on the other side of the street, and came to a halt in the middle of the street. Several feet away, its crumpled front fender spun lazily over the asphalt.
The whole thing happened in seconds, too swiftly for Jan or Carol to intervene.
Jan dove lower, mentally preparing herself for the dizzy head rush that always ensued when she tried to grow immediately after returning to normal size from her Wasp form. If necessary, she and Carol could rip the doors off the car, get the driver out before—
The driver's-side door popped open, and the driver leaped out and began running down the street. Directly into Carol, who landed in his path, arms folded over her chest.
"Leaving the scene of an accident is a crime, you know," she said, voice mild.
"Jesus fuck, my car!" a man wailed. The black Mercedes that the driver had hit after bouncing off the SUV had probably cost more than most people made in a year. Now, with both passenger-side doors crumpled in, it was just a very expensive insurance claim.
Jan returned to full size just before she landed, putting herself between the Mercedes owner and the driver — now struggling futilely in Carol's grasp. "Has anyone called the police yet, or do I need to?" she asked. This was ridiculous — traffic accidents were not supposed to be the kind of thing superheroes dealt with — but they'd been right there, and jumping in had been instinctive.
Calling the police, as it turned out, wasn't necessary. They arrived on the scene only moments later, sirens quiet but lights on, arrested the driver, and began taking witness statements. Apparently, the driver had been fleeing from the scene of the crime after robbing a drug store on 8th avenue.
No wonder Spiderman was so mouthy all the time; he had to deal with criminals this stupid on a regular basis.
Of course, it wasn't necessarily bad driving on the would-be robber's part that had caused this. According to the police databases and radio frequencies Tony had been watching, traffic accidents were yet another thing that had increased in the vicinity of the cathedral, like muggings, domestic violence calls, and a bunch of other petty, every-day evils that superheroes could do nothing to stop.
Carol was right; they had to do something about Chthon. Waiting around in the hopes that they could stop him whenever he finally made his move was already costing the city too much.
At least no one had died in this accident. The subway passengers last week had not been so lucky.
The flight back to Stark Tower was uneventful, if even colder than before. By the time they were over Times Square, Jan had lost all feeling in her fingers and toes. Hank was either treating her winter gloves and boots with Pym particles tonight, or he was sleeping in his lab. Which would probably be a more effective threat if he didn't frequently do that anyway, because he'd worked on something non-stop until he crashed.
If he didn't come up for air tonight, she was going to the Mansion to fetch him. It was always a bad sign when Hank stopped sleeping.
"I hate to say it," Carol said, so softly that the communicator only just picked it up, "but in some ways, the city might be better off if she hadn't come back." She didn't need to specify who 'she' was. "Except... I would never want her to stay trapped, not like that. But if what happened when she destroyed the mansion is anything to go by, things are going to get a lot worse."
Thor was not the only one who needed to suck it up and deal with things. Jan executed a fast turn, hovering just in front of where Carol's face was going to be in about thirty-seconds. "She was possessed, Carol," she said flatly. "She had no choice about any of what she did. How is it different from when Vision was controlled by the Ultron protocols, or when Tony and I were poisoned by AIM? I could have hurt someone then. Tony could have killed someone — if Steve hadn't been able to talk him down out of the armor, he would have." She jabbed a finger at Carol, the motion making her dip slightly in the air. "Her brother is God knows where, her father tried to use her to destroy the world, and her husband is dead. Leave her alone."
"That's not what I meant," Carol snapped, holding up gloved palms defensively. She was hovering, too, now, the ground dozens of feet below them. "Jesus, what kind of grudge-holding bitch do you think I am? I understand that it wasn't her fault. I get it. I'm over blaming her. I just don't want Chthon to use her like some puppet again and destroy the city in the process."
"Really? You got over something?" She sounded bitchy, she knew, not at all the way the co-leader of the Avengers should sound when talking to a teammate about her inability to get along with another teammate. Carol and Wanda had been friends, once, but now Carol seemed just as resentful of Wanda as Spider-Woman had been toward Carol after she had sided with Tony and joined the pro-Registration heroes. Except this one probably wasn't going to be resolved by a threesome with Simon.
"You sound like Jessica," Carol muttered. "I know it wasn't her fault," she repeated, more calmly this time. "Cap told me. Tony told me. Simon and Jessica told me. Clint told me. Even Wanda told me. And then Clint... Chthon hurt her, while he was in her head. Used her body to do things. It's not her fault. It's ours, for not stopping it."
Below them, people on the sidewalk were starting to stop and stare. They were too far up for their voices to be audible, but the faint honking of car horns drifting up from stopped traffic could just be heard.
"Come on," Jan said. "Let's find somewhere else to talk."
The penthouse at Stark Tower was empty — Sam and Jarvis long since jumped ship to the now-completed Avengers Mansion, Hank was nowhere to be found, probably still buried in one lab or the other, and Thor was gone, too. Either he or Don was probably back in Oklahoma. They both had responsibilities there.
This, Jan felt, was a conversation that called for ice cream. She brought a pint of Haagen Daaz and two bowls out from the kitchen, offering one to Carol, who was sitting on the shorter of the living room's two couches, her arms folded.
Carol shook her head. "I don't have an energy mutant's metabolism."
Jan raised her eyebrows. "No, you have Kree metabolism, which is even better. I hate you and Jen sometimes. It's one of the perils of being short; five pounds looks like ten on me." She set the bowls to one side and dug her spoon straight into the ice cream; it wasn't as if anyone else ate it, anyway, with Spiderman and Jessica Jones no longer staying in the tower. Thor, who was better at respecting labels on food than most, never touched her ice cream.
"I was so angry at her," Carol said, after a long silence during which Jan dug all the pecans out of the top layer of ice cream. "I thought she'd put Clint under mind control. Tony and Jen, too. Lot of us have had bad things happen to us. The rest of us didn't try to destroy us all over it. And then... M Day scared me. Taking away people's powers, turning mutants back into normal people. There are people who'd like to do that to me. To take away what I felt for Jessica, what I still feel, and make me a good little woman who does what she's supposed to. Because they think the world would be better that way."
"It wasn't her," Jan repeated. If she said it often enough, eventually she would stop watching Wanda uneasily for signs of... something. She wasn't even sure exactly what, only that people who had been broken once could break again, usually in the same places. But possession was external, the work of an outside force, something you could guard against and fight.
Carol shook her head. "I know that now. It doesn't actually make it easier. How long did it take before you wanted to be in the same room as Hank again?"
"That's different." Jan set the ice cream container down, hard. "That was Hank."
Carol met her eyes, her face serious. "But he wasn't in control, any more than she was. Any more than Tony or I were when we were drinking. And anyone who loses control like that once can do it again."
"We're not talking about Hank."
"No," Carol agreed, "we're talking about Wanda. We screwed up, big time. We should have gone to get her as soon as Clint came back and we knew where she was. We shouldn't have let Chthon take her in the first place. But we did, and he did, and if he gets his hooks into her again, he could turn Manhattan into a smocking crater."
Jan shook her head, reaching for the ice cream again. "He won't. Strange took care of that."
"He shouldn't have had to," Carol said, frowning. "We should have helped her. I should have helped her. She tried to help me. But then Vision, and Clint, and... I wanted to leave her to rot. And all the time, he was doing things to her, with her." Her voice faltered on the last, leaving no doubt as to what kind of 'things' she meant.
"We don't know that," Jan said quickly. It was true, she didn't know for sure, but… Clint must have slept with Wanda in Transia, while she had been under Chthon's control, probably while Clint was under mind control, too. That, or something very close to it. Nothing else that Jan could think of would explain the way Carol kept being so deliberately vague about exactly what unknown but terrible things Chthon had done to Wanda, when it wasn't like Carol to dance around something. Not to mention the weird, guilty look in Clint's eyes whenever he looked at her, and Carol's previous fierce conviction that Wanda had hurt Clint in some way that clearly seemed worse to her than even his temporary death.
"Neither does she, other than that he used her to manipulate Clint." 'Manipulate,' another vague word. Carol rubbed at her arms for a moment, the gesture understated enough that it was probably unconscious. She had taken her gloves off, though her mask was still on, and Jan could see her bitten-off nails, one of them torn halfway across the nail bed where she had broken it moving pieces of rubble. If she offered to loan her a pair of nail scissors, or the name of a good manicurist, Carol would probably look at her blankly and turn her down.
"That makes it worse," Carol added, and if Jan had still not believed her insistence that she didn't blame Wanda anymore, the odd, subdued note in her voice would have convinced her.
Not knowing probably did make it worse. If you knew, you at least knew exactly how bad it had been. Missing time, when anything at all could have happened, and might have, would be even more frightening.
Jan nodded, slowly. "What made you change your mind? I thought you were angrier at her than any of us." Tony had blamed himself. Steve too, in a quieter sort of way. Simon hadn't wanted to discuss it, and those first few weeks immediately afterwards, Hank had alternated between trying — endlessly and aloud — to figure out how they could have prevented Ultron from taking over Vision and shutting himself in his lab and speaking only to his specimen tanks. Carol had laid all the blame squarely at Wanda's feet.
Carol looked down at her hands. "Clint told me some things about what happened in Transia. I didn't want to listen, at first, but..." She looked back up, a rueful little smile on her lips. "I owe her an apology. God, that's going to be fun. What am I going to say, 'I wanted to believe you were evil because I liked you and then you hurt my feelings?'
"By liked, do you mean..." Jan gestured vaguely with her spoon. Asking felt weird, intrusive. She was never quite sure when she ought to acknowledge Carol's sexuality, and when she ought to ignore it because it was supposed to be no big deal. Carol herself seemed occasionally unsure; she'd never actually said anything about it to the press, despite not doing anything to hide her relationship with Simon and Jessica from the public eye. In some ways, it was easier with Steve and Tony; before The Article, everyone had acknowledged their relationship to other superheroes and denied it to reporters, just the way you did someone's secret identity, and afterwards, Steve had been very insistent on never concealing or tiptoing around anything, to the point of delivering an embarrassing lecture on acceptance and tolerance if you tried.
Carol shrugged, tucking a piece of hair behind one ear. "If there hadn't been... a lot of missed opportunities, the two of us could have-um..." She waved her hands in an equally vague gesture.
"Had wild lesbian sex?" Jan guessed.
Carol's ears and cheeks flushed pink. "I wouldn't go that far, but-" she broke off, then, "Give me the ice cream," she said, abruptly, grabbing for one of the abandoned bowls.
"I've been eating it straight out of the carton," Jan said, tilting the top of carton towards her.
"I'm immune to most human viruses. It's a Kree thing." She didn't look at Jan while she served herself ice-cream — half of what remained in the carton, which was probably a good thing for Jan's thighs. "Right before the end, if I had stayed after Red Zone. Before that, either I wasn't on the team or she was with Simon, or I was still drinking. It was always something. I never expected anything like what happened. It felt... personal. Stupid, I know, but-"
"No," Jan said. "I know what that's like. You used to have a crush on her, and then she betrayed us, and the fact that part of you wanted to forgive her just because she was staring at you with those big blue eyes and looking all wounded made you even angrier."
"Wanda's eyes are brown," Carol said. Which wasn't really an answer, but in a way, was.
"That's not the point." Jan pointed her ice cream spoon at Carol again. "The point is that you feel guilty because she needed help and you didn't notice in time to stop it, or couldn't stop it. And the fact that she did terrible things makes it even more complicated, because you did have a legitimate reason to be angry, and where's the line between understanding and forgiving and condoning?" She'd asked herself that dozens of times, every time she had to justify to someone else why she'd chosen to go back to Hank. 'Because I love him,' wasn't enough, not after everything that had happened between them. "And you keep asking yourself if you could have prevented those things by noticing or helping sooner, if you made it worse. And sometimes it's easier to get angry than admit that there's nothing you can do to go back and fix things."
Carol was silent for a long moment. Maybe she had said too much, made it too much about herself. She didn't talk about her marriage — former marriage — to her teammates very often for a reason. It made things awkward, even with people who didn't know why it had ended.
"It's killing Simon," Carol said, finally, and Jan relaxed inwardly at the change of subject. "He still loves her, you know. More as a friend than anything else, but... he loves her. I know he wants to talk to her, but I think he still blames her for Vision dying and feels guilty for it. Simon doesn't like emotional confrontation." She smiled a little, just for a moment. "I think Jessica and I wore him out sometimes, honestly." Then the smile faded, and she added, quietly, "I don't know if he's afraid that she isn't really Wanda anymore, or that she is."
"You've told him she is, though." She didn't make it a question.
Carol bit at her lower lip for a second, then blew out a long breath. "Yes. I know he wants to believe it. Hell, I want to believe it. Everything in Transia was definitely Chthon, maybe all of it was even Chthon. M Day..." she made a face. "I can't imagine the Wanda we knew before or Wanda now doing something like that, but if she wanted to hurt Magneto, it was probably the worst thing anyone could possibly do to him. To Pietro. And Wanda had good reasons for being angry at them, for wanting to punish them." She took a bite of ice cream, then, "It didn't have to be about them at all, though. There are lots of reasons why Chthon might want to cut down the world's mutant population. But the things she did to us. Making Jen lose control and Hulk out, pushing Tony off the wagon, bringing Ultron back... Chthon doesn't care about us. We're insects to him. How would he know exactly where to hit to hurt us so badly? So personally?"
It had the sound of something she'd worried over for a long time, and Jan suspected that these weren't just Simon's concerns she was voicing.
Jan shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe he pulled the information from her mind."
"He probably did, but that sounds almost too convenient to be true. I wanted to believe it wasn't her, that she wouldn't do that to us, and so I couldn't trust the part of me that wanted to believe her, especially not when everyone else was accepting it all so easily. Simon doesn't do suspicious well, but if he lets himself believe it's really her, and then it's not... And I can't tell him what Clint told me. There are some things he doesn't need to hear."
"He'll come around eventually," Jan said, trying to sound certain. "And he doesn't need you to be angry for him."
"I'm not." Carol's voice was firm, level. "Not anymore."
"Good," Jan told her, "because Cap and I are keeping her on active status. With things the way they are, we're going to need her. And I don't think the team can take having two more people in the field who won't talk to each other. Hank and Tony and Thor are dangerous enough already."
Carol snorted. "Hank and Tony and Thor are all idiots. There wasn't anything else they could have done, not with the way HUSAC was breathing down our necks. Tony's going to give himself another breakdown if he doesn't stop feeling personally responsible for every single bad thing that happened under the SHRA."
Privately, Jan suspected that if it weren't for the Extremis, Tony would probably benefit from a prescription for anti-depressants. That, or therapy. He'd been barely functional during the endless three months when Steve had been dead and Registration and the Initiative had been in full force, though he'd hidden it well. And it hadn't been that long since Rumiko Fujikawa's death. Two dead lovers in as many years would have screwed up even someone who didn't have Tony's history with depression and self-destructive behavior.
Frankly, they could all probably use a few visits to a therapist, but years of keeping secret identities secret were a hard habit to break. She'd actually had to argue Hank out of just getting a recommendation for medication out of Leonard Samson and then synthesizing his own; during the height of the fight over Registration, before she'd walked away because she couldn't take Bill's death and the fighting and the 1984 levels of creepiness anymore, the government had kept a very close eye on anything that smacked of instability in superhumans. If he'd gone to an Initiative doctor, Hank might have ended up sitting in a cell in his and Tony's own prison.
Tony, thankfully, had found him a discrete, private source for the mood stabilizers and anti-depressants Len had suggested, and some day she was going to have words with Reed Richards about his ridiculous 'you could just make this yourself' suggestion.
Thank God he hadn't gone to a SHIELD psychiatrist. Dr. Faustus had been able to program Sharon Carter into shooting Steve, despite being both his friend and occasional lover for years; she didn't even want to think about what he could have done to Hank.
"The Hank, Tony, and Thor situation will be resolved," she said. "I was trying not to get involved because I couldn't be impartial, but that was when I thought they were going to work it out themselves." Clearly, that assumption had been overly optimistic. Thor wasn't likely to listen to her — she'd been on the pro-registration side, after all — but Hank would.
"Good," Carol said. "Because having Wanda back in the line-up is awkward enough." She put her empty ice cream bowl down, the spoon clinking against the side of the bowl. "What are we going to do if Chthon gets to her again?"
Jan ran a finger slowly around the rim of the ice cream carton, the waxed cardboard smooth and slightly sticky. After a moment of deliberate silence, she met Carol's eyes. "Whatever we have to."
Chapter One | . . . | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen, part one | Chapter Fourteen, part two | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Epilogue
Not 100% happy with some of the scenes in this chapter, but it was past time we just posted it already. And on that note:
ITS FINISHED!!! (And it only took three freaking years – god, can we apologize enough?) The entire rest of the fic is now complete and being edited (all 150,000 words of it). Expect weekly updates from now on.
no subject
no subject
Weekly updates... oh, wow!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I immensely enjoyed this chapter, even though I had a little trouble at first with remembering some plot points (but with WEEKLY UPDATES that's not gonna be a problem anymore :D) but still, it was great fun, as always. I think I liked best Clint (Clint, baby! I always liked the way you wrote him, especially in When The Lights Go On Again) and his conversation with Hank got me laughing so hard, in spite of being quite serious :) Poor Hank, nobody believe's he has any work ethic. The part, with Jan and Carol, was also great and kinda heart wrenching, so I'm anxious to see where this will lead, even more since Carol/Wanda fics are so hard to come be (not that I have anything against Carol/Jess, but it is the dominant Carol!pairing right now, I think).
Also, dear Cat, stop scratching Jarvis's floor, he's going to be very cross with you.
All in all, great chapter. I'm looking forward to reading more and on a regular basis. On the other hand, thinking of this story as finished is kinda scary... I think the first few chapters were already up when I got into the comic fandom so it has a lot of sentimental value for me... Still, it's 150 000 words of sheer awesomeness. I think it'll sooth my poor broken heart :)
no subject
I really enjoyed Carol and Jan talking things out with ice cream help.
Aaand weekly updates, really? Is it Christmas?
no subject
no subject
Expect weekly updates from now on.
Awesome!!
no subject
Some fav parts:
"Yeah, that was before my time." Clint tried a smile. "Wanda, Pietro and I got the teamwork speech. Repeatedly." Cap had been even bossier back then, and convinced that being five whole years older than everyone else made them all children who needed his wise and experienced guidance. In retrospect, though, even Clint could admit that he and Pietro had been kind of bratty.
and
Hank didn't seem to hear him; his face had lit up in a wide grin that would have been endearing if it didn't bring to mind evil robots, hoards of creepy-crawly things, and plans that went terribly, disastrously wrong.
lol poor Hank! I am a weirdo and find his and Reed's scientific focus (over say, the mundane human world and such) very charming.
I also loved Jan and Carol talking about things (and, yes, please, let's stop blaming Wanda for things she did while possessed, though I also loved the worries that maybe not everything was possession...)
no subject
Even with weekly updates, I can't start reading until the whole thing is posted, or I'll be itching for the next part. Despite the length, I know I'm going to want to read the whole thing at once - or at least, over a couple of days, rather than several weeks.
Thanks for persevering and finishing the story despite the amount of time involved. I'm sure it'll be well worth the wait!
no subject
I read the first 2 on AO3 and when I realized that they were posted so long ago I didn't really expect another one, and then I saw this update and I was "OMG there's a third story!!!!" I can't wait to read more :-)
no subject
The only problem is that because I went back to chap one and then read forward, we'll there's a gap between chap 11 and 12.
Not a big deal this time because I just went to the front page of the cap_ironman com and got it from chap 13, but yeah. Probably something you should fix for the future?
Edit: I the links on the bottom I mean, there's no good like between chap 11 and 12.