Reassembled, chapter 15

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

Title: Reassembled, Chapter 15
Authors: 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 Fifteen


He was, Tony decided, spending entirely too much of his life in the Helicarrier's infirmary recently.

The metal exam table and just-slightly-too-cold air conditioning had not improved since his last visit, and the vise-like pain in his head was all-too-familiar as well. His hopes that SHIELD's doctors would give him a quick once-over and then release him had probably been doomed from the start — he'd known that when he'd woken up in a quinjet with Steve's hand gripping his and no clear memory of how he'd gotten there — but they'd died an even swifter death than he'd expected once they landed on the Helicarrier's deck.

He still hadn't gotten around to reconfiguring the quinjets' wings to fold up, though he'd added tail-hooks and reinforced the landing gear for carrier landings just in case back during his brief and disastrous turn as director of SHIELD. The Helicarrier's deck crew was probably cursing his name at the moment.

Tony resisted the impulse to tug at the IV in the crook of his left arm — he must have still been dazed when they'd put it in, or he'd have reminded the doctors that he was left handed and it would be his right arm with tubes and needles stuck in it — and ignored the fact that what he most wanted to do at the moment was lie back down on the depressingly familiar infirmary bed and close his eyes. "Have you tried pin-pointing their locations with their communicators?"

Agent Hill would have said something cutting. Sharon simply shook her head. "It was the first thing we tried, while the doctors were still looking at you. Doom is either blocking them or he's destroyed them."

Of course he had. Doom wasn't stupid. Still, it had been worth a try.

"I've tried seeing if I could sense the book's location, but there's too much ambient chaos magic in the city now." Wanda, sitting on the edge of one of the other beds, stared down at her hands, tracing one of the black patterns that covered the back of her left hand with a fingertip. She had a butterfly bandage over her cheekbone, where a bruise had swollen and split the skin, and there were still tiny chunks of plaster in her hair.

The doctors had finished with both her and Sam in a matter of minutes, but Steve had insisted that they brief SHIELD on what had happened here rather than going to a conference room; Tony would have been grateful not to be cut out of things, but he suspected that Steve just didn't want to leave him.

"We have agents looking for property in the city owned by Doom or by Latverian companies," Sharon said, "but they've been at it for weeks already and haven't found anything that Doom could use for holding prisoners."

Barnes snorted. "An office building would work just fine. All you need is someplace with a basement. Or a storage or service area that no one checks that often. Hell, a restaurant with a walk-in freezer would work."

For a terrorist group or ordinary criminal or even most other supervillains, but not for Victor von Doom. "That's too pedestrian for Doom," Tony told him. "He'd insist on something with more flair."

Sam frowned. "We don't know that Doom has them," he pointed out once again. "Sin's the one that took them, and she didn't sound happy with Doom when they left."

"He has to have something she wants desperately in order for her to be working with him at all, and if Thor's right, she's just lost her place as his most valuable ally. She'd turn them over to him, if only in order to gloat about it." Steve sounded sure of himself, but Tony had known him long enough to be able to tell when he was trying to convince himself as well as everyone else.

He almost reached out to take Steve's hand, then remembered just in time that his left arm was a tangle of tape and plastic tubing and moving it would pull at the IV.

"You'd better hope so." Barnes shook his head. "I wish we could help more. I owe Pym for the snake venom thing." Barnes didn't believe in being reassuring; Tony liked that about him.

Steve, who did believe in being reassuring, smiled at Barnes as if he were still the cute, innocent kid he'd once been — a cute kid who, going by the man's record at SHIELD, had probably mostly existed in Steve's head to begin with. "You're doing plenty."

Tony pulled his attention away from Steve, making himself turn to smile at Sharon. The expression made his face ache — his entire body felt as if it had been slammed into a wall repeatedly, despite the fact that he had no visible injuries. "Once I've analyzed the mansion's security system and figured out what Doom did to it, I'll reconfigure SHIELD's anti-teleportation shields for you. Tell Maria she'll owe me."

Sharon raised her eyebrows. "You can tell her yourself. I try not to interfere in your relationship." Something about the way she said it made Tony automatically want to protest that he and Maria Hill didn't have a relationship, but recently he'd ended up talking to her almost as often as he did Fury or Dugan. Tony suspected that Fury had decided that watching him and Maria try to be as professional as possible while pretending they weren't sniping at one another was even more entertaining than baiting or manipulating Tony himself.

"You're not analyzing the mansion's security unless you can do it from here while the doctors finish checking you out," Steve said. He was staring flatly at Tony, his arms folded across his chest, stern expression almost hiding the worry underneath. He didn't sound like he was happy with the order, but he did sound like he was determined to enforce it.

Well, this was going to have to be one time that Captain America lost. "I'm fine," Tony said. "'We want to keep you overnight for observation' is doctor speak for 'There's nothing seriously wrong with you but your medical history makes us nervous.' I just need a couple hours of sleep and some aspirin, and then I'll be good as new." It was a slight exaggeration, considering how much effort just sitting up and talking was taking, but Tony had been in enough hospitals and seen enough doctors to know when they thought you were seriously ill or on the verge of death, and when they were just being cautious, and the looks he'd been getting and firm-yet-polite "suggestions" that he rest and recover and not pull the IV line out of his arm that he'd been given fell under "just being cautious." And even if they hadn't been, with Hank missing, Tony was the only one who could properly run a diagnostic on the mansion's systems.

Steve didn't dignify that with an answer; he simply stared at Tony, looking unimpressed by his logic.

"You didn't see yourself," Sam told him. "You were unconscious and bleeding from your nose and mouth."

"I bit my tongue when Doom zapped me." Which had probably looked gruesome, but was completely cosmetic. The nosebleed the feedback from his armor's frying systems had given him was a little less so, but it was nothing that hadn't happened before. He'd brought it on himself, really, between falling so easily to Doom's modified weaponry and then being stupid enough to try using the Extremis to reactivate their communication systems, which was a mistake he wouldn't be making again.

"I can't stay here," he told Steve, giving logic one more try. "No one else can fix the security system. And I need to take a look at any data the mansion's sensors got when they teleported out, if there is any. I might be able to track down their location that way, or at least give us a radius for how far away they could have gone." The method of teleportation Doom used made it impossible to pinpoint exact coordinates without access to the machine itself, but the more power the teleportation took, the farther the distance teleported would be.

Wanda looked up, her face half-hidden by a tangle of dark curls. "If you can get either me or Stephen within a few blocks of the book, we ought to be able to feel it then."

Steve vetoed that with a head shake. "No, you're staying here, too. He wanted you as well as the book."

Her eyes narrowed. "And he can teleport here as easily as the mansion," she said, voice sharp in a way Tony hadn't heard since she'd come back.

"Actually," Tony said, for the sake of accuracy, "he can't. Not as long as the Helicarrier's in motion."

Wanda gave him an annoyed look, and he belated realized that maybe it would have been wiser not to point out that the Helicarrier was, in fact, slightly safer than the mansion at the moment, though it was obvious enough that Steve wouldn't really have needed the confirmation. A moving target was always harder to hit than a stationary one.

They couldn't afford to waste time on this argument, not with Hank and Jan missing. "I'm not staying. We don't have time for it. Doom's got the Dee manuscript, which he can presumably use to acquire the spear, and once he's got that, there's going to be damn little we can do about it." And they still didn't know what Sin actually wanted, other than just to kill everyone. And if Thor was right, Loki was involved somehow as well, obviously having moved on to a new temporary ally in her quest to regain the spear for herself.

No matter how tempting it became, he was not going to point out how much better it would have been to have her nominally on their side rather than against them.

Steve's face and ears were starting to flush red. "And how is you giving yourself a heart attack or brain aneurysm going to help us stop that?" he demanded. He bent over Tony — who suddenly regretted the fact that he was still sitting on the side of the infirmary bed-and stabbed a finger at his chest, continuing in an increasingly louder voice, "What the hell was that with the communications system? We had an agreement!"

Tony swatted Steve's hand away and glared up at him. "I forgot for five seconds during an emergency situation while I was half conscious," he snapped. Purple and grey sparks flickered at the corner of his vision for a moment, and he blinked them away. "Sue me."

Steve straightened, throwing up his hands. "That's it," he half-shouted. "I told you that if I caught you using the Extremis you were off active duty."

Sharon took a step forward, sliding between the two of them with complete disregard for Steve's personal space. "Great," she said. "We can use him here." She set one palm flat against Steve's chest and gave him a firm shove backwards. "Calm down, Steve, or I'll have you thrown out of the medical bay. Tony's not the only patient here."

Steve turned away with an inarticulate noise of frustration. He looked as if he were contemplating kicking something.

Sharon looked distinctly unimpressed. "This kind of thing is why we broke up," she said, looking back over her shoulder at Tony. "More than once."

"This is different," Steve muttered.

Tony already regretted raising his voice. It wasn't going to do anything to change Steve's mind, not when he had that stubborn "my way is the only right way" set to his jaw, and had only succeeded in making his headache worse.

Sam, Wanda, and Barnes all looked uncomfortable; he was probably going to regret having this out in front of them later, but at the moment, Tony couldn't summon the extra energy to care. "I'm sorry I scared you, but we don't have time for this right now. Dealing with Doom is more important."

"You're not backing me or anyone else up in a fight until the doctors say you're not going to be liability."

The flash of hurt he felt was ridiculous — Steve was just being over-protective and stubborn and unreasonable and... he still managed to have a point. He was a liability at the moment, had been steadily more and more of one recently as his ability to use the Extremis decreased.

Tony gritted his teeth and tried for reasonableness. Maybe Steve was right to want him out of the field, but that didn't mean he had to be completely useless. "Then I won't. But that doesn't mean I need to be stuck here. The security system-"

"Please," Steve interrupted, his face and voice softening. There was something almost pleading in his eyes, and a raw, desperate edge to his voice, and what could Tony say to that?

Tony sagged back, defeated. It wasn't fair; all he really wanted at the moment was to lean into Steve's side and close his eyes, or maybe just lay down, but he'd gotten used to not doing what he wanted a long time ago. "Fine. I need you to send me all the data from the mansion's systems, and keep us" he jerked his head at Wanda, "updated on everything the rest of you are doing and anything you find out. And I'm not staying here more than twenty-four hours, no matter what the doctors say."

Wanda nodded. "And I need to talk to Strange. I know you don't want me going up against Doom or Chthon, but I have to do something."

"Strange is in Hell's Kitchen," Barnes volunteered, from where he leaned against the corner of another bed. For all that he'd trained with Steve, the way he held himself reminded Tony more of Natasha, a kind of coiled readiness that managed to be relaxed and dangerous at the same time. He'd stayed out of their fight, but Tony suspected that he would have been between them in an instant if he'd thought it was necessary, possibly with a knife. "He and Cage and Murdock are guarding the cathedral. Spiderman might be with them as well; he's hard to keep track of."

Tony couldn't help smiling at little, despite everything. That had been true of Peter even when they'd been on the same team. The concept of checking in and telling other people what he was doing seemed to be foreign to him, and he'd only just been starting to adapt to being part of a team when everything had gone to hell.

Sam was leaning forward slightly, looking deeply relived that the conversation had gotten away from Tony and back to the matter at hand. "Luke and Spiderman still have their Avengers communicators," he said. "We can stay in contact with them that way."

"Do that," Tony ordered. "And see if... no, if their communicators aren't showing up, Hank's Ant-Man helmet will be blocked as well. Doom probably wouldn't let him keep it anyway." Hank's helmet had a unique electronic signature, easy to track if you knew what to look for, but meaningless electronic noise if you didn't.

If it were activated, Peter would probably be able to track him down; it operated on a frequency similar to his spider trackers.

Tony pointed this out, along with the fact that it was a ridiculously unlikely long shot, and then one of the SHIELD medical personnel, who had until then been ignoring them, started heading in their direction.

The infirmary, he explained when he reached them, was not one of the Helicarrier's conference rooms, and everyone who wasn't a patient could go and find themselves one.

So much for being or even limited usefulness.

"We'll find you some temporary quarters," Sharon was saying to Wanda.

Tony reached out and caught Steve's wrist, tugging him back over to the side of his completely unnecessary infirmary bed. "Are you okay?" he asked quietly. As annoyingly irrational as Steve was being at the moment, he still didn't like the idea of letting him storm out still angry at him. Especially not after Doom's little bombshell earlier. It was probably too much to hope that Steve had forgotten it in the heat of the moment. Not when it had stopped him cold in the middle of a firefight.

Steve shook his head, and tugged his wrist away. "I'm fine. You should get some rest." He started to turn away, then, abruptly, swung back and bent down to kiss Tony.

It was more a momentary press of lips to his than a real kiss, and then Steve was wrapping an arm around him and leaning his forehead against his, holding on to him tightly for one brief moment.

Then he released Tony, straightened up, and followed the others out of the room.

* * *

There was a body hanging from one of the ceiling beams, blood dripping slowly from a slashed-open throat. The air was thick with the smell of it, like raw meat, and the choking haze of incense that surrounded him only made it worse. Blood, smoke, and underneath it, the sick, grey reek of something rotting. He couldn't breathe, couldn't-

He tried to sit up, to roll over onto his side, anything to get away to clean air, but his couldn't move, his body so heavy that he couldn't even lift his head.

There was blood in his mouth, thick and metallic, so much that he was choking on it, and he couldn't breathe, his lungs as paralyzed as the rest of him.

The body rotated, slowly, hair trailing through the puddle of blood on the floor, and Bucky's face stared at him with milky, dead eyes. His arms had been tied behind his back, before, but now they dangled limply, metal fingers brushing the floor, and that wasn't right, he'd still been a kid when he died. He hadn't had the arm until later.

Steve gasped, finally managing to draw in a real breath, and his eyes snapped open.

The cat was flattened on his chest, one ear flicked back. When he felt Steve start to shift his weight, he gave the little, unhappy growl he made when he was grumbling about something but not actually likely to claw you.

Steve closed his eyes again and went limp, trying to catch his breath. Not real, he told himself. Bucky was fine; he'd seen him just a few hours ago. There was no smoke, no blood, nothing wrong with his lungs, and whatever Doom had done to bring him back, it hadn't been like that. He didn't remember it, couldn't remember it. He'd been dead.

Whatever Doom had done to change that hadn't been his fault. Tony had been right about that, for all that he'd expressed it by mis-quoting C.S. Lewis. Steve had had no part in it.

"Steve?"

Steve turned his head — the cat growled warningly again — to see Sam stretched out on the other couch, propped up on one elbow and blinking blearily at him.

"Sorry," Steve said, after several deep breaths to make sure his voice wouldn't come out in a shaky gasp. "I didn't mean to wake you up."

He hadn't meant to fall asleep at all. When they'd all returned to Stark Tower, to set up temporary headquarters in their remaining undamaged living space, Carol had "suggested" that everyone without a half-Kree metabolism catch a couple of hours sleep, so that they wouldn't be operating solely on what little sleep they'd gotten last night when the inevitable crisis hit.

Steve had lain down on the couch, intending to just close his eyes for a few minutes and then get right back up again, claiming that he was too keyed up to sleep and might as well make himself useful. They ought to have more than just one person on alert in case Doom picked these next few hours to make his move.

There had been no point in going to bed for a few minutes' worth of catnapping, and their bedroom here probably wasn't even made up anymore. And part of him had balked at the idea of sleeping in their ridiculously huge bed without Tony, which was pure silliness.

"You didn't," Sam said. "I wasn't sleeping." The way he was rubbing at his eyes and blinking made that a lie.

There was a moment of awkward silence, and Steve was contemplating shoving the cat off his chest and getting up rather than risking another nightmare when Sam spoke again.

"More nightmares, huh? Do you want to talk about it?"

"No." It would only sound pathetic, and he'd have to tell Sam about what Doom had said, that he'd been brought back by human sacrifice. Sam would be horrified, and he'd feel guilty for being relieved and happy that Steve was alive, and then would feel even worse about feeling guilty over that, and Sam had been through enough misery over the whole thing already. He'd been there when Steve had been shot; Bucky had told him about it, afterwards, and about Sam stepping up to finish the speech Tony had tried to give at his funeral.

Sam didn't need to know. And telling him about the dream wouldn't help, anyway. Talking about them had never had much of an effect on whether or not they recurred or how quickly they went away.

Sam rubbed at his face for a moment, then swung his legs over the side of the couch and sat up. The bruises on his face had swollen until his left eye was half-shut; Steve winced internally looking at it. Sin's handiwork.

"Yeah, okay," Sam said quietly. "Is there anything I can do?" He said it casually, as if Steve's nightmares were only mildly interesting to him, and Steve was grateful for that, even though he knew the casual unconcern was put on for his benefit.

Steve sat up, the cat leaping from his chest to the floor, where he paced back and forth, tail twitching in a series of offended little jerks. Steve had clearly failed in his duties as cat furniture.

Maybe Patton missed Tony; he usually made it clear that he regarded Steve as an inferior substitute for him in all ways. Considering how much noise and upheaval he'd been through today, though, he might still be traumatized enough not to care. He'd refused to come out of his cat carrier when Steve had rescued him from where he'd been huddled in the closet of his bedroom and brought him to Stark Tower, growling and hissing at anyone who came near him and actually climbing back inside it when Steve had tried lifting him out.

He probably blamed Steve for Tony's absence, for once not entirely without reason.

Making Tony stay on the Helicarrier had been the right thing to do, but at the moment, Steve found himself wishing he'd given in to Tony's arguments and let him come back with them. Tony kept the nightmares away, and when he didn't, he still managed to calm Steve down enough for him to fall back to sleep without fear of having more.

He offered Sam a weak smile. "I don't suppose you could recite the engineering schematics for quinjet engines?"

Sam cocked his head slightly, looking faintly amused. "Not really, no."

"I didn't think so."

They were silent for a moment, while the cat prowled around the room, tail and fur still twitching. The he froze, crouched low, wriggled his entire little orange body, and launched himself at Sam's foot.

Sam hissed through his teeth, snatching his — sock-clad — foot away. "Your cat is really annoying. You know that, right?"

"I've been trying to train him not to bite people. It doesn't seem to be working." Stern tones of voice didn't seem to bother the cat, and pushing him away or swatting him gently on the head or shoulders was giving him what he wanted by paying attention to him, and only seemed to encourage him.

"I wasn't planning on sleeping that long anyway," he added, after a moment. "I hate sitting around twiddling our thumbs when psychopaths like Sin and Doom have two of our teammates. There has to be something we can do."

"I hear you." Sam drew his feet up onto the couch and sat cross-legged, foiling the cat's attempts to bite and kick at his other foot. "Tony might be able to track them through the sensor readings we sent him."

"If the data's any good. None of us are computer experts." If that was the case, and Jan and Hank spent more time in supervillains' hands than they would have if he'd given in and let Tony have his way... Then he'd just have to deal with it. It had been the right decision to make at the time, and second-guessing himself now wouldn't help anyone, least of all Jan and Hank.

At least they hadn't taken Sam. The thought made him feel like a selfish bastard, as well as a terrible friend and team leader — he shouldn't be relieved to have one friend's safety come at the expense of another's — but Sin had a personal vendetta against all the people who'd been directly involved in the Red Skull's death, Sam included. Tony was probably right that she would hand Jan and Hank over to Doom in order to keep his goodwill. Sam, she would never have given up, no matter how many alliances it cost her. And if past experience was anything to go by, she might actually have lived up to her threat to send his body parts to Bucky in a box.

"The museum people are going to kill us if Doom damages that book," Sam said. As attempt to lighten the tone of conversation went, it wasn't bad, but Steve found that he didn't particularly care about angry museum trustees and potential lawsuits at the moment.

"We'll apologize to them as nicely as we can," he said. "I think I'll go call Bucky. Maybe they've made some progress on tracking down Doom's headquarters." He'd vanished from the Latverian embassy the previous evening, several hours before his attack on the mansion, and the Avengers, SHIELD, and the NYPD had all been met with polite shrugs and an obviously rehearsed statement that Latveria's beloved leader had left to return to Doomstadt, and that they had no idea of his current whereabouts.

"At least Sin doesn't have Barnes. Or Sharon." Sam touched a hand to his bruised face again. "What she did to me would be nothing compared to what she'd probably like to do to them. Crossbones didn't die easily, or cleanly." He grimaced. "It wasn't right. I should have stopped Barnes, but in the end, I wasn't sure Crossbones didn't deserve it. Half the reason Sin's as batshit as she is is because of what he did to her."

"I know," Steve said, trying not to think too hard about what Bucky killing someone 'not cleanly' might have involved, even if that someone had been a monster like Crossbones. "But if she's hurt Hank or Jan, I don't care how crazy she is. SHIELD's psychologists can have her when we're done with her."

He stood up, brushing futilely at the cat fur on the front of his costume. "SHIELD took custody of at least three bodies. There must be some clue on one of them that would tell us where they're operating from. A cell phone in someone's pocket, a wallet, mud on one of their boots that's found only in one specific part of the city."

Sam nodded, putting his hands on his knees and visibly forcing himself to his feet. Steve felt a pang of guilt; Sam was injured, if only minorly, and had probably needed the sleep Steve had interrupted.

"Go call and check on your boyfriend," Sam said, giving Steve a knowing look that implied that he was on to Steve's true purpose and that it didn't include asking SHIELD for tactical updates.

Steve gave Sam's shoulder a shove when he drew level with him — not hard, just in case he'd collected more bruises than the one on his face — but didn't dispute the statement. If SHIELD had truly made any kind of breakthrough, Hill or Sharon would have called. Tony was going to be fine; he'd been shocky and had some kind of electrolyte imbalance and the doctors had made worrying comments about 'being cautious' over his arrhythmia 'just in case,' but the Helicarrier's medical staff had sworn to Steve that rest, IV fluids, and a couple of weeks to heal would take care of everything.

They weren't going to have a couple of weeks, but for now Tony was safe from everything except the Extremis and his own stupidity. Steve didn't actually need to check on him, any more than he needed to talk to Bucky, who was also perfectly fine, regardless of whatever horror film imagery his subconscious had come up with.

It would still be nice to hear their voices, and even taking useless action was better than doing nothing at all. And talking to Tony would chase away the last remnants of uneasiness his dreams had stirred up.

Sam shouldered Steve out of the way and reached the door first — retaliation for the shove — then hesitated, half-turning. "If Doom's really working with Loki, are we sure wherever he's taken them is even in this dimension?"

Steve made a face. "Don't borrow trouble. We've got enough already."

* * *

After the many times Loki had betrayed everyone around him, it was foolish that this most recent betrayal still stung.

Loki had as good as told him of her intentions, threatening Thor and everyone connected with him unless he did what she bid him. He had refused, as anyone with honor or sufficient experience would have. He should have expected this.

Instead, he had been caught unawares, and his teammates had paid the price for it.

He would see this rectified. Thor examined the golden ring that lay in the center of his palm; so small a thing to seem so ominous. Loki had sworn that it had the power to summon her, that all he need do was hold it and speak her name thrice.

He would call, and she would come — not to the Avengers Mansion or Stark Tower, as she had no doubt expected, but to his father's throne room. Let her see Hlidskjalf, the throne she wanted so badly. Mayhap it would make her more likely to believe in what he would offer her.

The stones of Asgard were stronger than the mortal brick and mortar of the Avengers Mansion. Let her bring her new allies with her; it would avail her not. Here, Thor had allies of his own, allies less fragile than his mortal teammates, who were but a single shout away.

When Loki came, he would offer Asgard's aid in recovering Baldur's Bane in exchange for the return of the Wasp and Hank Pym. Their rescue would have to come first, he would tell her, as restitution for aiding Doom.

Then, when his teammates were safe once more, he would be the one to break their bargain. There would be a penalty, for deliberately breaking one's word was not a thing to be done lightly — men would call him oathbreaker, and he would know the words for truth — but honor ceased to be honor if a man held it more dear than his shieldbrothers' lives.

The idea of willingly aiding Loki in her transparent grab for power made him feel unclean, and the prospect of pretending to aid her only to stab her in the back as she had done to so many others was even worse, but had he done so before, she would not have gone to Doom to achieve her aims, and the Wasp would not have been captured, nor Iron Man injured. Iron Man, who was already ill. Nor Hank Pym captured, who was still Thor's teammate and thus his comrade in arms regardless of his past behavior and refusal to apologize for it.

Don Blake had wished to discuss this with the other Avengers first, but Thor had over-ruled him. Loki was Thor's area of expertise, not Don's, and the rest of their teammates were either wounded or distraught at the moment.

Thor closed his hand around the ring, grimacing in distaste, and then said Loki's name.

"Loki Laufeyson, Lie-Smith, sly one, sky walker, I summon you. Loki Laufeyson..."

No sooner had Loki's name left his lips for the third time than a cold swirl of fog enveloped him. Mjolnir was ripped from his grasp, and the floor dropped away beneath him.

He hit the ground hard, bad knee giving way. He flung out his hands to catch himself, and both hands and knees slammed against a concrete floor, sending a numbing jolt of pain up his bad leg.

Loki's malicious laughter rang in his ears. "You've made it even easier than I expected, Thunderer. No mortal heroes to aid you, no Warriors Three to guard you. I didn't expect you to be alone when you used my pretty little toy. It makes a woman wonder."

Don stared up from where he knelt on the floor to see Loki standing over him, the huge golden horns of her headdress silhouetted against the ceiling.

It was two stories overhead, with exposed iron ceiling beams. The high windows designed in the nineteenth century to let in light had been boarded over, so that the huge, open space of the warehouse floor was lit only by a dim, bluish glow that came from some unknown source behind Loki.

Mojlnir lay on the floor several yards behind her, transported along with him to a spot just close enough to be taunting, but far away enough to be completely out of reach.

Silently cursing Thor, and himself for being stupid enough to go along with Thor's brilliant plan to begin with, Don tried to shove himself to his feet.

One booted foot hooked his right hand out from under him, and he collapsed back to the floor.

"I think not, step-brother. I find I like the sight of you on your knees." Loki smiled down at him, and it wasn't just the sharpness of her canine teeth that made the expression predatory. She bent and cupped one hand under Don's chin, lifting his face toward her in a parody of gentleness. "Such a shame you can't be in your proper form for this. This mortal shell is not nearly so comely."

"Stop it," he snapped, trying to jerk his chin free from her grip. Her fingers tightened to the point of pain, and he forced himself to hold still. "We both know you're not attracted to me or Thor." The sexual harassment disturbed his other self enough that Don felt his own skin crawl at her touch. The dark hair that brushed his face could almost have been Sif's, if it hadn't smelled of dank caves and woodsmoke. "What do you want, Loki?"

She let go of his chin and straightened, and Don wished viciously for his cane. One swipe at her ankles with it, and she would be the one falling face-first onto the floor. Or not — Loki was stronger than he was, immensely so.

"I? I don't want anything from you. The time for bargains between us has come and gone." Her voice was poisonously sweet. "You, my dear step-brother, are my bride-gift for my new consort."

Doom. She was giving him to Doom. Don got his feet under him and launched himself at Loki, ignoring the way his knee flared with pain. Thor's memories of countless battles were there in his head, nearly indistinguishable from his own; he slammed his shoulder into her stomach, reaching for her belt knife. A stab upwards under the ribs or into the kidneys would take down even a giantess, and then he could get to Mjolnir and-

A hand wrapped around his wrist, crushingly tight, and Loki's fist hit his face so hard that he saw white for a moment.

Don went limp, everything around him knocked out of focus. Something slammed into his thigh with numbing force, and then he was flying.

He hit the concrete with bone-jarring force. He struggled to breath for an endless moment, lungs paralyzed by the impact, and then everything faded away.

* * *

The entire block was deserted, except for the huge black man who was loitering around 'reading' the list of service times posted next to the cathedral door. Luke Cage. It must be his shift in their pathetic little guard detail.

Normally, she'd enjoy taking him out on the way in, but it could wait until she had the spear. She'd have magic power of her own then, enough that his invulnerability and brutish strength would be no obstacle.

Then there would be no need to rely on Doom anymore.

It was past time to end their alliance anyway. His impatience to leave at the Avengers Mansion had cost the opportunity to capture Wilson. She'd had him on his knees to her, so close to opening his throat. If Doom had waited five minutes...

When she'd confronted him, he'd sneered at her and said that they had two other Avengers and Wilson's capture was immaterial to their goals. "To your goals, Victor," she muttered, "but not to mine."

"His kind always lie," her father's voice said. "They're naturally dishonest. You knew better than to trust him."

She almost pointed out that he'd been the one to form the alliance in the first place, but daddy didn't like it when she talked back.

If she'd still had her contacts in SHIELD, she would have gotten in touch with them and told them where Doom was holding the worthless extra Avengers. A nice little distraction to keep both her enemies out of her way. At least her efforts so far had SHIELD distracted enough by her attacks on them that Fury had never figured out her plan, despite her father's worries that he would remember the ritual and interfere. And they'd been fun. More would follow once she had the spear, until all her enemies were dead at her feet.

At least Barnes had gotten a taste of what was to come, even if she hadn't managed to kill Wilson or the Carter bitch. Next time, she'd use a stronger poison. Something messy, like strychnine.

Cage stayed oblivious to her as she crept past him to one of the building's side doors; irritating as Doom was, he did have his uses.

The nave of the cathedral was dark, except for a scattering of candles in front of a statue of the Virgin. Doom's spell muffled her footsteps, so her boots made only a faint whispering sound against the stone floor. It sounded almost like words.

Doom's spell from that damn book had to be read at the altar rail. He'd given her a computer print-out of the words, written phonetically and with the stressed syllables bolded, as if she were a child or an idiot. Being neither, it took Sin only a few minutes to read it out.

The air around the altar blurred and rippled, and then a spear was lying across it lengthwise, glowing with a faint, green light.

The head was about the size of her palm, made of some kind of silvery metal, and the haft was wood, just over two feet long. Sin frowned at it; she'd expected something more impressive, as well as larger. This looked almost like a toy.

The second ritual took longer to perform, involving a circle of red chalk, several candles, and a blood sacrifice. Luckily, it only required a few drops of blood and she could use her own — trying to bring along a human sacrifice victim or black chicken or goat would have made things a lot more difficult.

Magic had not been one of her father's preferred tools — it was a waste of time compared to the elegance of the cosmic cube — but that superstitious idiot Himmler had liked it, so he'd had to learn some of the basics. Yet one more reason why things would have gone differently if he had been given the power he'd deserved. This rite was intended to invite a demon or otherworldly force to possess the caster and imbue them with its powers. With it, she would be able to take the spear's magic into herself.

Sin smeared her bloody fingertip along the edges of the black sun she'd drawn in the center of the circle — right below the altar where the spear lay — and recited the final words of the incantation. The original ritual ended with the caster chanting the name of the entity they were summoning three times. Since Sin had no intention of actually allowing herself to be possessed by Loki in order to gain access to the power he'd stored in the spear, she substituted "open me to the power that is in this place," instead.

The candles on the altar flickered and went out, and a faint susurrus of noise began somewhere behind her, growing louder and louder until it echoed off the stone ceiling. The hair on her arms stood up, the power that was about to be hers crackling over her skin.

Sin laughed, a surge of glee filling her. She and her father would reshape the world in his image, create a new Reich on American soil, one that truly would last a thousand years.

Doom had given her a 'protective gauntlet,' supposedly to keep the power of the spear from incinerating her, but obviously intended simply to keep her from taking it for herself. She pulled it off, tossed it to the floor, and reached for the spear.

At last! After so long straining to send his influence through worn places in the walls of his prison, success was his. The mortal woman was offering herself up to him, all but demanding that he use her as a vessel.

His chosen avatar would have been preferable, of course, or even the interfering mortal sorcerer, but any avenue into the dimensions he'd been barred from was to be seized.

Another had been here before him, the fading remnant of a mortal spirit. It took only a thought to destroy it. The vessel resisted, but she was his now, and after a moment's exercise of his will, Chthon looked on the interior of the cathedral through her eyes.

His abilities would be limited in this new host, since she had no magic of her own for him to use, but she was only a temporary stopgap. With the spear's power and this form giving him the ability to influence this dimension, he would release himself from imprisonment himself, as he had meant to do through his avatar.

His vessel strode down the long center aisle of the church, the votive candles the mortals had lit to their virgin goddess extinguishing as she passed them. She had entered through stealth, but would not need it in order to leave. He was Chthon, and no mortal could stop him.

* * *



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

This chapter's a bit late – sorry about that. It was a busy weekend.