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_ironman2013-06-23 09:39 pm
elspethdixon.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2013-06-23 09:39 pm
Entry tags:
Reassembled, chapter 14, part 1
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 14
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 swearing and 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. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, 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 Fourteen
The alert jolted Tony out of a sound sleep, the Extremis sending it ringing through his skull and flashing the data against the backs of his eyes.
He was already sitting upright, one hand pressing at the ache behind his eyes, trying to wake up enough to focus on what the mansion's systems were telling him, when the building's intruder alert went off.
Steve rolled out of bed in one fluid motion, faster and more graceful than anyone who'd been asleep less than a second ago had a right to be. He was on his feet with his shield in his hand while Tony was still trying to disentangle himself from the sheets.
"It's Doom. Or Sin. One of them. They teleported in." The alarm currently trying to blind and deafen him was from the anti-teleportation shields, which he'd originally set up to alert him via the Extremis if anyone used Doom's dimensional transport device or anything that matched its energy signature to enter the mansion. Which meant that the invader, whomever they were, was already inside, not at the edge of the mansion's lawn where the perimeter sensors would have picked them up long before they set foot on Tony's property.
"The book." Steve was already moving toward the door, his bare feet silent on the wooden floor. "They're after the book. How did-"
"Steve," Tony interrupted, "clothes." Naked, bent in an athletic crouch with his shield in one hand, Steve was a sight to strike awe into the heart of an intruder, but he was also completely vulnerable to enemy weapons fire. His leather and scale mail wouldn't stop bullets, or even slow them appreciably, but it would at least blunt the impact of one of Sin's poisoned daggers.
His own protection was a lot more substantial. Tony let the under-armor ooze out of his pores and called his armor, grateful that that much of the Extremis, at least, still worked. He went from naked to armored-up in thirty-seconds, while Steve was still hopping on one foot trying to simultaneously pull on his leather pants and put on boots.
"Go," Steve ordered, the word muffled as he dragged his tunic on over his head. "I'll catch up to you in a minute."
Tony nodded and took off — literally — for the containment vault.
Interfacing with his armor didn't count as 'using the Extremis,' not really, and it was faster and more efficient than using voice commands and the HUD displays. The schematic of the mansion he called up via the Extremis was lit up like a Christmas tree with heat signatures, the armor's sensors picking up intruders on all levels. There was no way of knowing which one was Doom or Sin and which were Sin's hired thugs, but it didn't matter. They were here for the John Dee manuscript, so Tony would have to get to it first.
Several of the intruders were in the basement, almost on top of the vault, but it would take them time to get around the security he and Hank had installed, if they were even able to. Nobody Sin would have been able to hire could get around Tony's security protocols, and Sin herself had always favored machine guns and knives over electronic warfare. Doom, on the other hand... He could undoubtedly hack or disable almost anything Tony could set up, but he wouldn't be able to do it quickly.
The hallways and stairs blurred around him, and he distinctly heard at least one objet d'art shatter as he blasted by it. It was probably rare, antique, and expensive, and would take hours' worth of negotiating with art dealers to replace; Tony ignored the sound, and flew faster.
He turned the final corner sharply enough to pull almost half a negative G, and nearly ran directly into Thor's armored chest.
"Iron Man." Thor greeted him without inflection. He nodded toward the closed door to the lab that held the containment vault. "There are at least four imitations of Doom in yon chamber, perhaps more. I cannot tell which is truly him, if any." Mjolnir smacked solidly against the palm of his left hand, once, then twice. "They shall not obtain what they seek."
"Even if they do, they're not leaving with it. At least, not the way they came in."
Thor took a step back, clearly preparing to kick the door in, and Tony quickly over-rode the electronic lock with the Extremis and ordered it open. Doom was going to do enough damage the Mansion without them adding to it.
His pulse throbbed painfully in his temples for a moment, warning him that any more attempts to use the Extremis to interface with equipment other than his armor would be a mistake. He was treading on the edges of his promise to Steve as it was.
The lab's blast door slid back into the wall, revealing six identical copies of Doom, weapons at the ready.
Scanning them with the armor's sensors was useless; each one appeared human not only to infrared heat sensors, but to the armor's more complex biorhythm sensors. They had heartbeats, something that registered on his sensors as functioning lungs, and even minute electrical impulses that mimicked human brain activity. Doom might be a megalomaniacal drama queen in a silly mask, but he was a genius with tech.
When all of this was over, he was going to enjoy taking one of these things apart.
Thor took a step forward, spinning Mjolnir in a slow circle. "If any of you actually are Doom, know that we will make you regret invading this place."
The Doom standing farthest to the right laughed, his mask making the sound hollow.
"Your step-sister is right," the Doom farthest to the left said. "You are a tiresome fool."
Thor drew his arm back, his hammer revolving more swiftly, then hesitated and turned to Tony. "Which of them is the true Victor von Doom?"
"I can't tell," Tony admitted. "He's upgraded his robots. Even SHIELD's LMDs aren't this seamless, and I designed those." That wasn't entirely true — Tony could distinguish an LMD from the real thing if he had the right equipment and a few moments to study it, but he was the one who'd designed and built them — but still, it galled. Doom wasn't supposed to be better than him.
"There are times when you're almost a worthy adversary," the second-to-the-left Doom said. "At the moment, however, you are simply in my way." He raised his right hand, and shot a stream of energy toward Tony's face.
* * *
The first Doombot had appeared directly in Wanda's bedroom. She had been awake, fortunately; she didn't sleep well these days, not since they'd brought the Dee manuscript into the mansion.
Her first hex sphere had hit it mid-chest, and the thing had ground to a halt in a sudden burst of sparks. She'd rolled out of bed, coughing a little at the reek of burned wiring, and thrown herself to the floor where the next attacker to teleport in wouldn't see her as easily.
For several endless moments, nothing had happened, and then something elsewhere in the mansion had exploded with a hollow boom.
She still didn't know what it had been; she hadn't made it past the front entry hall, where she found over a dozen Doombots, all of them throwing energy bolts left and right, and one.
Wanda threw another hex sphere at the closest robot, and winced internally as it fizzled out against some kind of shield. The first two had gone down instantly, but obviously her brief flash of good luck had run out. Oh, well. Things got boring if they were too easy.
"I'm disappointed," the Doombot said, in a perfect imitation of Doom's deep, cultured voice. "You used to present more of a challenge than this."
It made a grab for her, and Wanda ducked under its arm and inside its guard, shoving a fist-full of raw chaos energy into its metal faceplate.
With a roar of rage that sounded uncannily like Doom himself, the Doombot grabbed at its smoking faceplate, trying to rip it free while spidery threads of energy crawled over its hands. The faceplate peeled free, revealing bare circuitry underneath, and Wanda dodged backwards as two arrows the length of her arm punched through the Doombot's metal skull.
It hit the floor in a clatter of metal, the sound almost swallowed up by the ringing clang from across the hall.
Carol had torn off a Doombot's arm and thrown it at second, knocking it off its feet. She launched herself across the hallway at the downed robot, and laid into it with her bare hands, her fists leaving deep dents in its metal armor.
The sound of hollow, clanking steps behind her warned Wanda just in time. She turned, throwing a shield of chaos energy around herself, and a mailed fist grazed her cheek. For an instant, there was no pain, only a dull feeling of impact, and then her face started to throb.
She threw an uppercut at the underside of the Doombot's jaw, beneath the edge of its mask, letting its own momentum increase the force of the blow. It was less effective than Carol's punches, and significantly less effective than a hex sphere or blast of chaos magic, but the feel of the impact jarring up her arm was satisfying.
There were times when she understood completely why Cap and Thor liked hitting things so much. Doombots weren't alive, couldn't feel pain. There was no need to hold back, or to worry about accidentally killing or hurting anyone.
She could hear gunfire from elsewhere in the mansion, but none of the Doombots in the hall carried guns. More unusual luck; her shield would be as much of a danger as a defense in the face of gunfire. Bullets ricocheted off it at random, and it would have taken nearly all her concentration to keep them from hitting one of the others.
The Doombot's energy weapons crackled uselessly as she forced them to malfunction. It barely seemed to notice her next punch, all of its attention focused on trying to rip free the handheld force cannon she had fused to its gauntlet. The cannon was emitting a high-pitched whine, only moments away from exploding.
There was a bright flash of light at the corner of her vision, and a deep groaning sound vibrated through the soles of her feet. Something was—
Hands closed around Wanda's arms like a vise, and she was yanked violently off her feet as the grand staircase collapsed in a crash of splintering wood and plaster dust.
A chunk of plaster hit her in the face, dust and grit stinging in her eyes, and there was nothing but empty air beneath her feet. Wanda started to struggle, kicking backwards at her captor's legs and turning her head to bite at the arm around her chest. She remembered just in time that biting a Doombot was a bad idea, and unleashed a raw burst of chaos energy at it instead.
Carol's voice shouted something obscene in her ear, and Wanda went limp and tried to calm down. She'd been rescued, not attacked.
Carol set Wanda down and let go of her, taking a step back.
"Thank you," Wanda said, not turning around. The staircase now ended in a jagged, broken stub at the first landing, jutting out into mid-air with a pile of rubble beneath it. A length of scorched and twisted metal that had once been a robotic arm was sticking out from under a pile of splintered floor boards. None of the Doombots were still moving. Seen from the corner of her eye, they morphed into brightly colored metal and plastic, red and yellow and green reverting back to green and silver only when she looked directly at them.
Months worth of rebuilding, all erased in moments.
She fought back the urge to apologize — it wasn't her fault that Doom had attacked them — and glanced around for Clint. He was standing on the second floor balcony, looking trapped, irritated, and out of arrows.
There was another explosion of gunfire from one of the upper floors, and the sound of clanking metal boots in the hallway.
"Hawkeye," Carol ordered, "get your ass down here."
Clint planted one hand on the balcony rail and sprang over it, tucking and rolling so that he hit the ground shoulder-first, and sprang to his feet with a dramatic flourish that he immediately ruined by stumbling over a chunk of plaster.
It wasn't like last year. These were Doombots, not Ultron clones, and Clint was still alive. And she was in control of her own powers, her own mind.
She'd been dreaming about Chthon until that first Doombot had woken her up. The tattoo on the back of her neck still itched, though the backs of her hands no longer burned — they had literally burned, before, with an angry red glow that had died away before she'd finished waking up. Maybe it had been part of the dream.
"Not all of us can fly," Clint was saying. "Toss me one of those laser guns; I don't think I have any arrows left that aren't broken."
Carol ripped an energy gun free from one of the 'dead' Doombots' hands and held it out to Clint. "This will be more effective against them anyway."
"My arrows are always effective. Tell her, Wanda."
"You brag about yourself well enough without my help." It was jarring for a moment, how normal everything suddenly felt; it seemed as if this shouldn't be real. Not anymore.
Something exploded elsewhere in the mansion.
"Cap? Wasp? Anybody hear me and care to tell me what that was?" Clint tried his com link again, grimacing when it presumably failed to work. Wanda's had been producing nothing but static since the Doombot had woken her.
"Looks like we're on our own." Carol picked up a second energy gun, squinted at its dented barrel for a moment, then shrugged and tossed it aside. "Let's go find some more robots to smash."
* * *
Chewing through the vital circuitry inside a Doombot's head and torso was a suicide job, but a colony's soldiers were expendable to a certain degree. They went willingly, trusting Hank's assurance that the Doombots were a threat to their nests, and, incidentally, filled with something good to eat.
"Ants? You think to defeat the mighty Doom with insects?" it taunted, brushing casually at the soldiers crawling along one armored forearm. "I will-"
Its voice cut out abruptly, and Hank never got to hear the rest of the threat. It was moving jerkily now, as the ants' work began to interfere with its ability to send commands to its limbs. Unfortunately, it wasn't the only Doombot in the room.
Jan had already partially disabled one of the others, diving inside its defenses and ripping the vital wiring in the back of its neck out with her bare hands. It was stumbling around blindly now, swinging its fists at empty air and getting in the remaining Doombot's way.
The final Doombot ducked under a mailed fist, brought up the energy weapon it carried, and shot its compatriot twice, once in the torso and once in the head. The blasts of energy — was it laser fire, or plasma? Tony would know — left huge, smoking craters in the Doombot's armor, and it crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Hank threw himself to the side as his Doombot lurched toward him, ordering the remaining ants toward the still fully functional one, which was now aiming its energy weapon at Sam.
It shifted the barrel of the weapon toward the trail of ants and fired, burning a channel across the floor boards and incinerating Hank's final group of reinforcements. The super-colony that stretched from the Mansion's grounds to the tree plantings up and down the street was exhausted, and if Hank called up any of the other colonies in Central Park, they'd be more interested in killing the ants already here than in helping him fight Doombots.
Sam ducked under the Doombot's next blast and rolled, coming back to his feet beside the downed robot, the energy weapon it had dropped in his hands. "Surrender, and you might get to keep all your circuits in working order," he said.
"Bold words for a man with no powers wielding an unfamiliar weapon," it sneered.
Maybe that one actually was Doom. It seemed more intelligent than the others. It certainly sounded like him, but then, they all did.
Hank dodged backwards as the Doombot in front of him made one last, clumsy attempt to grab him, and went sprawling as his foot collided with something that rolled. He lay there for a second, all the air knocked out of him, and tried to force his lungs to work and his body to move.
Jan landed behind the Doombot, grew until her head nearly brushed the ceiling, and gave it a hard shove. It went flying, smashing mask-first into the floor with a ringing clank.
She planted one foot on its back and reached down to give Hank a hand up.
That was when the first of Sin's goons came through the door.
* * *
The hallway was dark, with just enough light filtering in from outside for Carol to see the long crack spidering across the ceiling plaster just outside the front hallway.
The house hadn't even lasted three months. At this rate, the insurance company was probably going to try to sue Tony.
Carol took the lead, pushing in front of Clint, who looked irrigated, but didn't argue.
Even out here, the air was thick with plaster dust, enough so that Carol could actually taste it against the back of her throat when she breathed in. It was nearly as bad as the collapsing skyscraper had been. She blinked, hard, and wished for half a moment that her costume had flight goggles.
Her eyes were still tearing up as she rounded the first corner and nearly ran smack into a dark-clothed man with an assault rifle.
He reeled back, eyes wide, and Carol snatched the gun out of his hands before he could recover. She had a moment to notice small details — a stocky build, a gap between his front teeth, a combat knife strapped to his thigh — and then three more men and a woman came pelting around the corner behind him, guns out and ready.
Wanda said something in Transian that made Carol's teeth ache, and pinkish-orange sparks flickered over the guns. One of the men swore, and there was a sharp bang as they all fired at once.
Carol flung her arms out, instinctively trying to shield her teammates, and felt a sharp sting across her left biceps. The impacts she was braced for didn't come; all but one of the weapons had jammed.
"Put the guns down or I'll do worse to them," Wanda said.
Predictably, none of the invaders did as she said. The woman took a step forward, her hand going to the back-up weapon she wore in a shoulder holster, and Clint fired a burst of energy at the floor just in front of her feet. It lit up the hallway like a lightning flash, rendering everything in bright blue-white and sharp-edged shadows.
The sharp smell of burning wood and carpet joined the haze of dust in the air. The woman ignored it; she drew her gun and charged forward, as if Clint and his energy weapon weren't even there.
Carol grabbed for her, her fingers closing around the woman's densely muscled upper arms, and got the hard barrel of the handgun jammed into her stomach for her efforts. It, too, misfired.
She took back almost everything she'd thought or said about having Wanda back on the team.
Then a blast of energy shot through the air over their heads, coming so close to Carol that she could smell singed hair. Not her own; it took more than an energy blast to set her hair on fire, even with her Binary powers long gone.
"I want the Scarlet Witch alive," a male voice proclaimed. "The other two are unimportant."
She didn't need to look up to recognize it as Doom. No one else could sound quite so arrogant.
Clint's gun made a barely audible whining sound as he fired it, the momentary flash of illumination showed Doom silhouetted against the darkness of the hallway, his armor a blaze of reflections and his dark green cloak leeched of color. He dodged sideways, faster than anybody wearing that much armor ought to be able to, and Clint's energy bolt burned a chunk out of his cloak rather than catching him squarely in the center of his breastplate.
"Don't be a fool," Doom sneered. "Do you really think I have no defenses against my own weapons? Drop the gun, and perhaps I'll let you live."
Clint's hand didn't waver. "The last three robots didn't do so well against it. For all I know, you're a robot, too."
Doom inclined his head. "Perhaps. And perhaps not." He lifted his own energy weapon and shot a long stream of blue-white fire at Clint, sweeping it across the hallway as Clint dropped to the floor to duck beneath it and started to roll back to his feet.
Wanda held up both hands, palms out, and the energy arced away from Clint, curving around him to burn a long furrow across the wall behind him.
The female invader lunged toward, slashing at her with a knife, and Carol blasted her back into the wall, expending all her stored power in one shot. It felt good, as it always did — a moment of pure, unrivaled adrenaline rush as the power flowed through her, a shadow of what it had been like to be the heart of a star. She would feel drained and empty, afterwards, but it was worth it to hear the dull thud of the woman's body hitting the plaster.
One of the invaders shouted, sounding more startled than afraid, and then all attacked at once, and the entire hall dissolved into a melee that was more brawl than gunfight.
She left the goons to Clint and Wanda and strode toward Doom, ignoring the blasts of energy he fired at her. It was like wading directly into a fire hose; she had to lean her body forward slightly to brace herself against the force of it.
The blasts of energy almost hurt as they struck her — no, scratch that, they did hurt — and she wondered for a moment if she'd have bruises tomorrow to go with the welt on her arm where the bullet had hit her. What the hell had Doom done to his weapons?
Not enough to keep her from being able to absorb their energy. It burned in her veins and across her skin, something about the power not quite right, but she could feel it settling into the empty places inside her, recharging her.
Carol smiled grimly at Doom, stopping just short of arm's reach — his reach, not hers.
"Am I supposed to be intimidated?" His mask was just as expressionless as Tony's faceplate, but it seemed even less human, despite the open mouth slit and the glimmer of his eyes visible through the eye holes. "I grow tired of you."
"You shouldn't have used the energy weapon on me," Carol told him, smiling even more widely at him. "Big mistake."
This time, she didn't expend all her energy, only most of it. The combined force of half a dozen blasts from his energy gun incinerated the remains of Doom's cloak and blew his metal face-mask clean off.
Underneath it was a robotic understructure, the silvery metal "skull" reminding her of the Terminator after its human face had melted off. It was almost disappointing; she'd always wondered what Doom looked like under that mask. A hideous mass of scar tissue, or some other terrible disfigurement worthy of the Phantom of the Opera, or a relatively normal-looking face that he'd decided to cover up out of pure melodrama? Either one seemed possible.
Carol punched the Doombot in the jaw with all the force she usually tried not to use on humans, then grabbed it by the shoulder and chin as it stumbled off-balance and ripped its head clean off.
The body fell to the floor with a loud, metallic thud, and Carol turned and slung the head underhand at one of the no-longer-armed goons. He went down as well, nearly taking one of his buddies with him, and the remaining two invaders left on their feet glanced from her, to Clint and his borrowed energy weapon, to Wanda.
There was a moment of tense, frozen silence, during which Carol could almost feel them debating whether or not to make one last suicidal attack, and then the two of them turned and ran.
"What did he mean, 'the other two are unimportant?'" Clint asked, folding his arms across his chest. The gun he still held in his right hand made the motion awkward.
Wanda raised an eyebrow at him. "You'd prefer it if he wanted to kidnap you, too?"
Clint shook his head, frowning. There was a fresh bruise blooming on his cheekbone, a mirror image to the one on Wanda's face, and the eye on that side of his face was red and angry looking and probably about to start swelling shut. One of the invaders must have gotten in a lucky punch. "He wanted you specifically. That can't be good."
Wanda nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. "Let's go find the real Doom," she said, "and ask him about it."
* * *
Tony didn't have time to dodge; he brought up one arm just in time to partially block the Doombot's blast, letting the armor's shielding absorb the force of it yet again. It dropped his shielding capacity to 52%, but it was worth it to imagine the expression Doom was probably wearing under that mask when Tony dropped his arm and took another step forward, apparently untouched.
He glanced back over his shoulder as the armor's short-range sensors registered someone approaching at a run, ready to turn and defend Thor's back against more copies of Doom, and relaxed when Steve dashed into the room, shield raised.
The multiple Dooms attacked the three of them as a synchronized unit. Normally, they would have made short work of a handful of Doombots, but he and Thor were hampered by the need to avoid bringing the ceiling down on their heads. He'd just had the place rebuilt, Tony thought, as a muffled boom sounded from somewhere overhead and the walls rattled, and already it was being destroyed again. It had been hard enough to find an insurance carrier willing to insure it the last time.
"Next time, let's do this at your place," he told the nearest Doom, and fired a repulsor blast at his torso at slightly under full power, just in case that really was Doom inside the armor and cape rather than a well-made LMD.
Steve wasn't as hampered; the two Dooms he was currently fighting both had large dents knocked into their torsos by Thor's hammer, and exposed wiring where pieces of their armor had been torn free. "But the décor here is so much nicer," he said, then slammed the edge of his shield into the corner of a Doombot's jaw. Its head snapped back with a force that would have broken the actual Doom's neck.
One of the Doombots had stepped back from the fight, and was tampering with the vault door, trying to manually bypass the security. Had Doom programmed it to take care of the door, was he remote-controlling it somehow, or had he actually deigned to show up for this fight in person?
Tony took a step toward him, intent on finding out, when a hollow boom sounded from one of the upper stories, followed by a loud rumble as the floor abruptly shook under his feet. Part of the building had collapsed; he hoped it wasn't structural.
Steve glanced upward, his shield at the read to block falling debris. "What was that?"
"Expensive," Tony told him. "Jan? Carol?" He tried to raise the others through the communicator in his helmet, and got only static and interference. Something was jamming the signal. Something that didn't register on his armor's sensors, and didn't interfere with any other electronics. The Extremis didn't seem to be affected by it either, but the situation wasn't desperate enough to warrant completely breaking his word to Steve.
"I hate magic," he muttered, and fired his repulsors at the nearest Doombot just on general principle. Then he spun to aim them at what he was assuming was Doom himself, and groaned internally.
Doom had the control panel partially removed now, and was up to his wrists in Tony's carefully designed circuitry. Thor was halfway across the room now, the shattered frames of two Doombots littering the floor behind him, but not close enough to stop him from triggering the door release.
Tony's repulsor blast hit Doom just as the door to the vault slid open, knocking Doom inside it.
Brilliant, Shellhead Tony thought. Why don't you just hand him the book on a silver platter while you're at it?
If he could reseal the vault door, it wouldn't matter. No amount of power Doom could conjure up and no weapon he might have brought with him could get him out of there.
He fired his jet boots and threw himself at the control panel, ignoring the sounds of Doom struggling back to his feet and the screech of rending metal that was Steve or Thor destroying the final Doombot.
The delicate circuitry that controlled the vault's door and locking mechanism was so much slag, fused together into a lump of gold, copper, and silicon that could almost have been beautiful if it didn't represent days' worth of effort and the loss of a chance to trap Doom where he stood.
He could hear the ring of Thor's boots against the floor and felt the edge of Steve's shield brush his armor as the two of them drew even with him, blocking Doom's exit from the vault.
"Drop the book, Doom," Steve said. "There's no way out. Your teleportation technology won't work in there."
Tony raised his hands and let his repulsors charge, preparing to incinerate the book in Doom's hands if he didn't comply. He would find some way to appease the museum later, if he had to.
"I think not." Doom shifted the manuscript to his left hand and raised his right hand threateningly. "The way out is obvious. I will simply go through you."
"Come then," Thor rumbled. "We are ready for you."
Doom ignored him, his gaze remaining on Steve. "I gave you life again, Captain. It would be a simple thing to take it back again, and none of your friends or allies would be willing or able to raise you a second time. You do not want to stand in my way."
Steve's chin went up slightly, his jaw tightening. "I think I do."
Doom was bluffing, surely. If the magic that had brought Steve back could be undone, Strange would have mentioned it.
Tony shifted a little closer to him just in case. "Give up, Doom. Even if you get out of that box, there's an energy field surrounding the mansion and grounds that disrupts access to the Negative Zone. Next time you try to break into my house, try not to do it using a copy of technology I worked on."
Doom laughed. It was the sort of sound that should have been accompanied by pipe organs and a crash of dramatic thunder. "You think to insult Doom? I will beyond such petty concerns soon."
"You'll always be petty, Doom," Steve told him, in the firm, disapproving-and-slightly-disgusted tone Steve was so good at.
"More insults. I killed valuable men to resurrect you; you should be grateful."
Tony heard a quick intake of breath from Steve, and, nearly simultaneously, a scraping sound from behind them. The armor's sensors registered movement; one of the Doombots was stirring.
He didn't have to look to know Steve was frozen, distracted. Doom was probably counting on that, had likely known the Doombot was still active before tossing that little bombshell at Steve.
He and Thor turned at the same time, both of them shouting warnings. The Doombot fired, Steve ducked, and Mjolnir smashed into the Doombot's skull all in the same instant.
Tony breathed again, starting to turn back to Doom, and a wave of energy hit him from behind, enough force behind it to throw him to the ground.
His shielding held for one endless fraction of a moment while all the armor's alerts flared red, then shorted out under the onslaught, and everything went red and white.
* * *
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | 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
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 swearing and 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. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:
dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, 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.
The alert jolted Tony out of a sound sleep, the Extremis sending it ringing through his skull and flashing the data against the backs of his eyes.
He was already sitting upright, one hand pressing at the ache behind his eyes, trying to wake up enough to focus on what the mansion's systems were telling him, when the building's intruder alert went off.
Steve rolled out of bed in one fluid motion, faster and more graceful than anyone who'd been asleep less than a second ago had a right to be. He was on his feet with his shield in his hand while Tony was still trying to disentangle himself from the sheets.
"It's Doom. Or Sin. One of them. They teleported in." The alarm currently trying to blind and deafen him was from the anti-teleportation shields, which he'd originally set up to alert him via the Extremis if anyone used Doom's dimensional transport device or anything that matched its energy signature to enter the mansion. Which meant that the invader, whomever they were, was already inside, not at the edge of the mansion's lawn where the perimeter sensors would have picked them up long before they set foot on Tony's property.
"The book." Steve was already moving toward the door, his bare feet silent on the wooden floor. "They're after the book. How did-"
"Steve," Tony interrupted, "clothes." Naked, bent in an athletic crouch with his shield in one hand, Steve was a sight to strike awe into the heart of an intruder, but he was also completely vulnerable to enemy weapons fire. His leather and scale mail wouldn't stop bullets, or even slow them appreciably, but it would at least blunt the impact of one of Sin's poisoned daggers.
His own protection was a lot more substantial. Tony let the under-armor ooze out of his pores and called his armor, grateful that that much of the Extremis, at least, still worked. He went from naked to armored-up in thirty-seconds, while Steve was still hopping on one foot trying to simultaneously pull on his leather pants and put on boots.
"Go," Steve ordered, the word muffled as he dragged his tunic on over his head. "I'll catch up to you in a minute."
Tony nodded and took off — literally — for the containment vault.
Interfacing with his armor didn't count as 'using the Extremis,' not really, and it was faster and more efficient than using voice commands and the HUD displays. The schematic of the mansion he called up via the Extremis was lit up like a Christmas tree with heat signatures, the armor's sensors picking up intruders on all levels. There was no way of knowing which one was Doom or Sin and which were Sin's hired thugs, but it didn't matter. They were here for the John Dee manuscript, so Tony would have to get to it first.
Several of the intruders were in the basement, almost on top of the vault, but it would take them time to get around the security he and Hank had installed, if they were even able to. Nobody Sin would have been able to hire could get around Tony's security protocols, and Sin herself had always favored machine guns and knives over electronic warfare. Doom, on the other hand... He could undoubtedly hack or disable almost anything Tony could set up, but he wouldn't be able to do it quickly.
The hallways and stairs blurred around him, and he distinctly heard at least one objet d'art shatter as he blasted by it. It was probably rare, antique, and expensive, and would take hours' worth of negotiating with art dealers to replace; Tony ignored the sound, and flew faster.
He turned the final corner sharply enough to pull almost half a negative G, and nearly ran directly into Thor's armored chest.
"Iron Man." Thor greeted him without inflection. He nodded toward the closed door to the lab that held the containment vault. "There are at least four imitations of Doom in yon chamber, perhaps more. I cannot tell which is truly him, if any." Mjolnir smacked solidly against the palm of his left hand, once, then twice. "They shall not obtain what they seek."
"Even if they do, they're not leaving with it. At least, not the way they came in."
Thor took a step back, clearly preparing to kick the door in, and Tony quickly over-rode the electronic lock with the Extremis and ordered it open. Doom was going to do enough damage the Mansion without them adding to it.
His pulse throbbed painfully in his temples for a moment, warning him that any more attempts to use the Extremis to interface with equipment other than his armor would be a mistake. He was treading on the edges of his promise to Steve as it was.
The lab's blast door slid back into the wall, revealing six identical copies of Doom, weapons at the ready.
Scanning them with the armor's sensors was useless; each one appeared human not only to infrared heat sensors, but to the armor's more complex biorhythm sensors. They had heartbeats, something that registered on his sensors as functioning lungs, and even minute electrical impulses that mimicked human brain activity. Doom might be a megalomaniacal drama queen in a silly mask, but he was a genius with tech.
When all of this was over, he was going to enjoy taking one of these things apart.
Thor took a step forward, spinning Mjolnir in a slow circle. "If any of you actually are Doom, know that we will make you regret invading this place."
The Doom standing farthest to the right laughed, his mask making the sound hollow.
"Your step-sister is right," the Doom farthest to the left said. "You are a tiresome fool."
Thor drew his arm back, his hammer revolving more swiftly, then hesitated and turned to Tony. "Which of them is the true Victor von Doom?"
"I can't tell," Tony admitted. "He's upgraded his robots. Even SHIELD's LMDs aren't this seamless, and I designed those." That wasn't entirely true — Tony could distinguish an LMD from the real thing if he had the right equipment and a few moments to study it, but he was the one who'd designed and built them — but still, it galled. Doom wasn't supposed to be better than him.
"There are times when you're almost a worthy adversary," the second-to-the-left Doom said. "At the moment, however, you are simply in my way." He raised his right hand, and shot a stream of energy toward Tony's face.
The first Doombot had appeared directly in Wanda's bedroom. She had been awake, fortunately; she didn't sleep well these days, not since they'd brought the Dee manuscript into the mansion.
Her first hex sphere had hit it mid-chest, and the thing had ground to a halt in a sudden burst of sparks. She'd rolled out of bed, coughing a little at the reek of burned wiring, and thrown herself to the floor where the next attacker to teleport in wouldn't see her as easily.
For several endless moments, nothing had happened, and then something elsewhere in the mansion had exploded with a hollow boom.
She still didn't know what it had been; she hadn't made it past the front entry hall, where she found over a dozen Doombots, all of them throwing energy bolts left and right, and one.
Wanda threw another hex sphere at the closest robot, and winced internally as it fizzled out against some kind of shield. The first two had gone down instantly, but obviously her brief flash of good luck had run out. Oh, well. Things got boring if they were too easy.
"I'm disappointed," the Doombot said, in a perfect imitation of Doom's deep, cultured voice. "You used to present more of a challenge than this."
It made a grab for her, and Wanda ducked under its arm and inside its guard, shoving a fist-full of raw chaos energy into its metal faceplate.
With a roar of rage that sounded uncannily like Doom himself, the Doombot grabbed at its smoking faceplate, trying to rip it free while spidery threads of energy crawled over its hands. The faceplate peeled free, revealing bare circuitry underneath, and Wanda dodged backwards as two arrows the length of her arm punched through the Doombot's metal skull.
It hit the floor in a clatter of metal, the sound almost swallowed up by the ringing clang from across the hall.
Carol had torn off a Doombot's arm and thrown it at second, knocking it off its feet. She launched herself across the hallway at the downed robot, and laid into it with her bare hands, her fists leaving deep dents in its metal armor.
The sound of hollow, clanking steps behind her warned Wanda just in time. She turned, throwing a shield of chaos energy around herself, and a mailed fist grazed her cheek. For an instant, there was no pain, only a dull feeling of impact, and then her face started to throb.
She threw an uppercut at the underside of the Doombot's jaw, beneath the edge of its mask, letting its own momentum increase the force of the blow. It was less effective than Carol's punches, and significantly less effective than a hex sphere or blast of chaos magic, but the feel of the impact jarring up her arm was satisfying.
There were times when she understood completely why Cap and Thor liked hitting things so much. Doombots weren't alive, couldn't feel pain. There was no need to hold back, or to worry about accidentally killing or hurting anyone.
She could hear gunfire from elsewhere in the mansion, but none of the Doombots in the hall carried guns. More unusual luck; her shield would be as much of a danger as a defense in the face of gunfire. Bullets ricocheted off it at random, and it would have taken nearly all her concentration to keep them from hitting one of the others.
The Doombot's energy weapons crackled uselessly as she forced them to malfunction. It barely seemed to notice her next punch, all of its attention focused on trying to rip free the handheld force cannon she had fused to its gauntlet. The cannon was emitting a high-pitched whine, only moments away from exploding.
There was a bright flash of light at the corner of her vision, and a deep groaning sound vibrated through the soles of her feet. Something was—
Hands closed around Wanda's arms like a vise, and she was yanked violently off her feet as the grand staircase collapsed in a crash of splintering wood and plaster dust.
A chunk of plaster hit her in the face, dust and grit stinging in her eyes, and there was nothing but empty air beneath her feet. Wanda started to struggle, kicking backwards at her captor's legs and turning her head to bite at the arm around her chest. She remembered just in time that biting a Doombot was a bad idea, and unleashed a raw burst of chaos energy at it instead.
Carol's voice shouted something obscene in her ear, and Wanda went limp and tried to calm down. She'd been rescued, not attacked.
Carol set Wanda down and let go of her, taking a step back.
"Thank you," Wanda said, not turning around. The staircase now ended in a jagged, broken stub at the first landing, jutting out into mid-air with a pile of rubble beneath it. A length of scorched and twisted metal that had once been a robotic arm was sticking out from under a pile of splintered floor boards. None of the Doombots were still moving. Seen from the corner of her eye, they morphed into brightly colored metal and plastic, red and yellow and green reverting back to green and silver only when she looked directly at them.
Months worth of rebuilding, all erased in moments.
She fought back the urge to apologize — it wasn't her fault that Doom had attacked them — and glanced around for Clint. He was standing on the second floor balcony, looking trapped, irritated, and out of arrows.
There was another explosion of gunfire from one of the upper floors, and the sound of clanking metal boots in the hallway.
"Hawkeye," Carol ordered, "get your ass down here."
Clint planted one hand on the balcony rail and sprang over it, tucking and rolling so that he hit the ground shoulder-first, and sprang to his feet with a dramatic flourish that he immediately ruined by stumbling over a chunk of plaster.
It wasn't like last year. These were Doombots, not Ultron clones, and Clint was still alive. And she was in control of her own powers, her own mind.
She'd been dreaming about Chthon until that first Doombot had woken her up. The tattoo on the back of her neck still itched, though the backs of her hands no longer burned — they had literally burned, before, with an angry red glow that had died away before she'd finished waking up. Maybe it had been part of the dream.
"Not all of us can fly," Clint was saying. "Toss me one of those laser guns; I don't think I have any arrows left that aren't broken."
Carol ripped an energy gun free from one of the 'dead' Doombots' hands and held it out to Clint. "This will be more effective against them anyway."
"My arrows are always effective. Tell her, Wanda."
"You brag about yourself well enough without my help." It was jarring for a moment, how normal everything suddenly felt; it seemed as if this shouldn't be real. Not anymore.
Something exploded elsewhere in the mansion.
"Cap? Wasp? Anybody hear me and care to tell me what that was?" Clint tried his com link again, grimacing when it presumably failed to work. Wanda's had been producing nothing but static since the Doombot had woken her.
"Looks like we're on our own." Carol picked up a second energy gun, squinted at its dented barrel for a moment, then shrugged and tossed it aside. "Let's go find some more robots to smash."
Chewing through the vital circuitry inside a Doombot's head and torso was a suicide job, but a colony's soldiers were expendable to a certain degree. They went willingly, trusting Hank's assurance that the Doombots were a threat to their nests, and, incidentally, filled with something good to eat.
"Ants? You think to defeat the mighty Doom with insects?" it taunted, brushing casually at the soldiers crawling along one armored forearm. "I will-"
Its voice cut out abruptly, and Hank never got to hear the rest of the threat. It was moving jerkily now, as the ants' work began to interfere with its ability to send commands to its limbs. Unfortunately, it wasn't the only Doombot in the room.
Jan had already partially disabled one of the others, diving inside its defenses and ripping the vital wiring in the back of its neck out with her bare hands. It was stumbling around blindly now, swinging its fists at empty air and getting in the remaining Doombot's way.
The final Doombot ducked under a mailed fist, brought up the energy weapon it carried, and shot its compatriot twice, once in the torso and once in the head. The blasts of energy — was it laser fire, or plasma? Tony would know — left huge, smoking craters in the Doombot's armor, and it crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Hank threw himself to the side as his Doombot lurched toward him, ordering the remaining ants toward the still fully functional one, which was now aiming its energy weapon at Sam.
It shifted the barrel of the weapon toward the trail of ants and fired, burning a channel across the floor boards and incinerating Hank's final group of reinforcements. The super-colony that stretched from the Mansion's grounds to the tree plantings up and down the street was exhausted, and if Hank called up any of the other colonies in Central Park, they'd be more interested in killing the ants already here than in helping him fight Doombots.
Sam ducked under the Doombot's next blast and rolled, coming back to his feet beside the downed robot, the energy weapon it had dropped in his hands. "Surrender, and you might get to keep all your circuits in working order," he said.
"Bold words for a man with no powers wielding an unfamiliar weapon," it sneered.
Maybe that one actually was Doom. It seemed more intelligent than the others. It certainly sounded like him, but then, they all did.
Hank dodged backwards as the Doombot in front of him made one last, clumsy attempt to grab him, and went sprawling as his foot collided with something that rolled. He lay there for a second, all the air knocked out of him, and tried to force his lungs to work and his body to move.
Jan landed behind the Doombot, grew until her head nearly brushed the ceiling, and gave it a hard shove. It went flying, smashing mask-first into the floor with a ringing clank.
She planted one foot on its back and reached down to give Hank a hand up.
That was when the first of Sin's goons came through the door.
The hallway was dark, with just enough light filtering in from outside for Carol to see the long crack spidering across the ceiling plaster just outside the front hallway.
The house hadn't even lasted three months. At this rate, the insurance company was probably going to try to sue Tony.
Carol took the lead, pushing in front of Clint, who looked irrigated, but didn't argue.
Even out here, the air was thick with plaster dust, enough so that Carol could actually taste it against the back of her throat when she breathed in. It was nearly as bad as the collapsing skyscraper had been. She blinked, hard, and wished for half a moment that her costume had flight goggles.
Her eyes were still tearing up as she rounded the first corner and nearly ran smack into a dark-clothed man with an assault rifle.
He reeled back, eyes wide, and Carol snatched the gun out of his hands before he could recover. She had a moment to notice small details — a stocky build, a gap between his front teeth, a combat knife strapped to his thigh — and then three more men and a woman came pelting around the corner behind him, guns out and ready.
Wanda said something in Transian that made Carol's teeth ache, and pinkish-orange sparks flickered over the guns. One of the men swore, and there was a sharp bang as they all fired at once.
Carol flung her arms out, instinctively trying to shield her teammates, and felt a sharp sting across her left biceps. The impacts she was braced for didn't come; all but one of the weapons had jammed.
"Put the guns down or I'll do worse to them," Wanda said.
Predictably, none of the invaders did as she said. The woman took a step forward, her hand going to the back-up weapon she wore in a shoulder holster, and Clint fired a burst of energy at the floor just in front of her feet. It lit up the hallway like a lightning flash, rendering everything in bright blue-white and sharp-edged shadows.
The sharp smell of burning wood and carpet joined the haze of dust in the air. The woman ignored it; she drew her gun and charged forward, as if Clint and his energy weapon weren't even there.
Carol grabbed for her, her fingers closing around the woman's densely muscled upper arms, and got the hard barrel of the handgun jammed into her stomach for her efforts. It, too, misfired.
She took back almost everything she'd thought or said about having Wanda back on the team.
Then a blast of energy shot through the air over their heads, coming so close to Carol that she could smell singed hair. Not her own; it took more than an energy blast to set her hair on fire, even with her Binary powers long gone.
"I want the Scarlet Witch alive," a male voice proclaimed. "The other two are unimportant."
She didn't need to look up to recognize it as Doom. No one else could sound quite so arrogant.
Clint's gun made a barely audible whining sound as he fired it, the momentary flash of illumination showed Doom silhouetted against the darkness of the hallway, his armor a blaze of reflections and his dark green cloak leeched of color. He dodged sideways, faster than anybody wearing that much armor ought to be able to, and Clint's energy bolt burned a chunk out of his cloak rather than catching him squarely in the center of his breastplate.
"Don't be a fool," Doom sneered. "Do you really think I have no defenses against my own weapons? Drop the gun, and perhaps I'll let you live."
Clint's hand didn't waver. "The last three robots didn't do so well against it. For all I know, you're a robot, too."
Doom inclined his head. "Perhaps. And perhaps not." He lifted his own energy weapon and shot a long stream of blue-white fire at Clint, sweeping it across the hallway as Clint dropped to the floor to duck beneath it and started to roll back to his feet.
Wanda held up both hands, palms out, and the energy arced away from Clint, curving around him to burn a long furrow across the wall behind him.
The female invader lunged toward, slashing at her with a knife, and Carol blasted her back into the wall, expending all her stored power in one shot. It felt good, as it always did — a moment of pure, unrivaled adrenaline rush as the power flowed through her, a shadow of what it had been like to be the heart of a star. She would feel drained and empty, afterwards, but it was worth it to hear the dull thud of the woman's body hitting the plaster.
One of the invaders shouted, sounding more startled than afraid, and then all attacked at once, and the entire hall dissolved into a melee that was more brawl than gunfight.
She left the goons to Clint and Wanda and strode toward Doom, ignoring the blasts of energy he fired at her. It was like wading directly into a fire hose; she had to lean her body forward slightly to brace herself against the force of it.
The blasts of energy almost hurt as they struck her — no, scratch that, they did hurt — and she wondered for a moment if she'd have bruises tomorrow to go with the welt on her arm where the bullet had hit her. What the hell had Doom done to his weapons?
Not enough to keep her from being able to absorb their energy. It burned in her veins and across her skin, something about the power not quite right, but she could feel it settling into the empty places inside her, recharging her.
Carol smiled grimly at Doom, stopping just short of arm's reach — his reach, not hers.
"Am I supposed to be intimidated?" His mask was just as expressionless as Tony's faceplate, but it seemed even less human, despite the open mouth slit and the glimmer of his eyes visible through the eye holes. "I grow tired of you."
"You shouldn't have used the energy weapon on me," Carol told him, smiling even more widely at him. "Big mistake."
This time, she didn't expend all her energy, only most of it. The combined force of half a dozen blasts from his energy gun incinerated the remains of Doom's cloak and blew his metal face-mask clean off.
Underneath it was a robotic understructure, the silvery metal "skull" reminding her of the Terminator after its human face had melted off. It was almost disappointing; she'd always wondered what Doom looked like under that mask. A hideous mass of scar tissue, or some other terrible disfigurement worthy of the Phantom of the Opera, or a relatively normal-looking face that he'd decided to cover up out of pure melodrama? Either one seemed possible.
Carol punched the Doombot in the jaw with all the force she usually tried not to use on humans, then grabbed it by the shoulder and chin as it stumbled off-balance and ripped its head clean off.
The body fell to the floor with a loud, metallic thud, and Carol turned and slung the head underhand at one of the no-longer-armed goons. He went down as well, nearly taking one of his buddies with him, and the remaining two invaders left on their feet glanced from her, to Clint and his borrowed energy weapon, to Wanda.
There was a moment of tense, frozen silence, during which Carol could almost feel them debating whether or not to make one last suicidal attack, and then the two of them turned and ran.
"What did he mean, 'the other two are unimportant?'" Clint asked, folding his arms across his chest. The gun he still held in his right hand made the motion awkward.
Wanda raised an eyebrow at him. "You'd prefer it if he wanted to kidnap you, too?"
Clint shook his head, frowning. There was a fresh bruise blooming on his cheekbone, a mirror image to the one on Wanda's face, and the eye on that side of his face was red and angry looking and probably about to start swelling shut. One of the invaders must have gotten in a lucky punch. "He wanted you specifically. That can't be good."
Wanda nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. "Let's go find the real Doom," she said, "and ask him about it."
Tony didn't have time to dodge; he brought up one arm just in time to partially block the Doombot's blast, letting the armor's shielding absorb the force of it yet again. It dropped his shielding capacity to 52%, but it was worth it to imagine the expression Doom was probably wearing under that mask when Tony dropped his arm and took another step forward, apparently untouched.
He glanced back over his shoulder as the armor's short-range sensors registered someone approaching at a run, ready to turn and defend Thor's back against more copies of Doom, and relaxed when Steve dashed into the room, shield raised.
The multiple Dooms attacked the three of them as a synchronized unit. Normally, they would have made short work of a handful of Doombots, but he and Thor were hampered by the need to avoid bringing the ceiling down on their heads. He'd just had the place rebuilt, Tony thought, as a muffled boom sounded from somewhere overhead and the walls rattled, and already it was being destroyed again. It had been hard enough to find an insurance carrier willing to insure it the last time.
"Next time, let's do this at your place," he told the nearest Doom, and fired a repulsor blast at his torso at slightly under full power, just in case that really was Doom inside the armor and cape rather than a well-made LMD.
Steve wasn't as hampered; the two Dooms he was currently fighting both had large dents knocked into their torsos by Thor's hammer, and exposed wiring where pieces of their armor had been torn free. "But the décor here is so much nicer," he said, then slammed the edge of his shield into the corner of a Doombot's jaw. Its head snapped back with a force that would have broken the actual Doom's neck.
One of the Doombots had stepped back from the fight, and was tampering with the vault door, trying to manually bypass the security. Had Doom programmed it to take care of the door, was he remote-controlling it somehow, or had he actually deigned to show up for this fight in person?
Tony took a step toward him, intent on finding out, when a hollow boom sounded from one of the upper stories, followed by a loud rumble as the floor abruptly shook under his feet. Part of the building had collapsed; he hoped it wasn't structural.
Steve glanced upward, his shield at the read to block falling debris. "What was that?"
"Expensive," Tony told him. "Jan? Carol?" He tried to raise the others through the communicator in his helmet, and got only static and interference. Something was jamming the signal. Something that didn't register on his armor's sensors, and didn't interfere with any other electronics. The Extremis didn't seem to be affected by it either, but the situation wasn't desperate enough to warrant completely breaking his word to Steve.
"I hate magic," he muttered, and fired his repulsors at the nearest Doombot just on general principle. Then he spun to aim them at what he was assuming was Doom himself, and groaned internally.
Doom had the control panel partially removed now, and was up to his wrists in Tony's carefully designed circuitry. Thor was halfway across the room now, the shattered frames of two Doombots littering the floor behind him, but not close enough to stop him from triggering the door release.
Tony's repulsor blast hit Doom just as the door to the vault slid open, knocking Doom inside it.
Brilliant, Shellhead Tony thought. Why don't you just hand him the book on a silver platter while you're at it?
If he could reseal the vault door, it wouldn't matter. No amount of power Doom could conjure up and no weapon he might have brought with him could get him out of there.
He fired his jet boots and threw himself at the control panel, ignoring the sounds of Doom struggling back to his feet and the screech of rending metal that was Steve or Thor destroying the final Doombot.
The delicate circuitry that controlled the vault's door and locking mechanism was so much slag, fused together into a lump of gold, copper, and silicon that could almost have been beautiful if it didn't represent days' worth of effort and the loss of a chance to trap Doom where he stood.
He could hear the ring of Thor's boots against the floor and felt the edge of Steve's shield brush his armor as the two of them drew even with him, blocking Doom's exit from the vault.
"Drop the book, Doom," Steve said. "There's no way out. Your teleportation technology won't work in there."
Tony raised his hands and let his repulsors charge, preparing to incinerate the book in Doom's hands if he didn't comply. He would find some way to appease the museum later, if he had to.
"I think not." Doom shifted the manuscript to his left hand and raised his right hand threateningly. "The way out is obvious. I will simply go through you."
"Come then," Thor rumbled. "We are ready for you."
Doom ignored him, his gaze remaining on Steve. "I gave you life again, Captain. It would be a simple thing to take it back again, and none of your friends or allies would be willing or able to raise you a second time. You do not want to stand in my way."
Steve's chin went up slightly, his jaw tightening. "I think I do."
Doom was bluffing, surely. If the magic that had brought Steve back could be undone, Strange would have mentioned it.
Tony shifted a little closer to him just in case. "Give up, Doom. Even if you get out of that box, there's an energy field surrounding the mansion and grounds that disrupts access to the Negative Zone. Next time you try to break into my house, try not to do it using a copy of technology I worked on."
Doom laughed. It was the sort of sound that should have been accompanied by pipe organs and a crash of dramatic thunder. "You think to insult Doom? I will beyond such petty concerns soon."
"You'll always be petty, Doom," Steve told him, in the firm, disapproving-and-slightly-disgusted tone Steve was so good at.
"More insults. I killed valuable men to resurrect you; you should be grateful."
Tony heard a quick intake of breath from Steve, and, nearly simultaneously, a scraping sound from behind them. The armor's sensors registered movement; one of the Doombots was stirring.
He didn't have to look to know Steve was frozen, distracted. Doom was probably counting on that, had likely known the Doombot was still active before tossing that little bombshell at Steve.
He and Thor turned at the same time, both of them shouting warnings. The Doombot fired, Steve ducked, and Mjolnir smashed into the Doombot's skull all in the same instant.
Tony breathed again, starting to turn back to Doom, and a wave of energy hit him from behind, enough force behind it to throw him to the ground.
His shielding held for one endless fraction of a moment while all the armor's alerts flared red, then shorted out under the onslaught, and everything went red and white.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | 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
no subject
Flight goggles!
Good old Doombots! And Doom himself! There's something about him sometimes that almost (only almost!) makes me want to see him succeed! I think it's because he may be kind of evil, but he's usually not stupid or overly malicious.