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cap_ironman2011-06-06 12:38 am
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2011-06-06 12:38 am
Entry tags:
Reassembled, Chapter 6
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 6
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.
Reassembled
Chapter Six
The kitchen in Stark Tower's penthouse was not large enough to comfortably accommodate eight people, but the kitchen was where the team had always gathered to hold discussions too informal to have around a council room table, so once Loki had left and the men and women who had fled the building to huddle in little knots on the sidewalk outside had all come back in, and the police had been assured that there was no need for their presence, the kitchen was where everyone went.
The room was full of the sound of too many people speaking too loudly, all at once. Hank was apologizing to Jan for not getting back from wherever he'd stormed off to in time to help confront Loki. Wanda was protesting to Sam that she and Clint should have been told about Loki's arrival immediately, and that she couldn't help them if she didn't know what was going on. Clint was on the phone with the West Coast Avengers, filling Carol in. And Tony was making a thus far unsuccessful attempt to get Steve and Thor to see reason.
"I think we sent her away too soon," he said, for the second time. "We should have heard her out."
"Loki's words are oft as dangerous as her actions," Thor said flatly. He was actually talking to Tony now, Loki's appearance having presumably provided the distraction of someone he hated even more.
"Loki's still more of a known quantity than Chthon is," Tony countered. "Yes, obviously, she'll try to stab us in the back, but if she helps us defeat Chthon first, then whatever treachery we have to deal with afterwards will be the lesser of two evils. We're majorly outclassed in terms of magical firepower right now." He turned to Steve, who could be counted on to be practical when it came to tactics. "You saw what Chthon did to Strange. If we try and fight both him and Loki at the same time, we're going to lose both battles."
"I hate to admit it," Sam said, turning away from Wanda and joining the conversation, "but that is actually a good point."
There was silence as everyone considered this, and Clint's too-loud words into the cordless phone he was holding between his shoulder and right ear were clearly audible for a moment. "Get back to New York, okay? This is more important than your booty call with Spider-Woman. I thought you guys were 'taking a break from each other' anyway."
"Loki despises us all utterly and is naturally aligned with Chaos," Thor rumbled. "There is nothing to stay her from deciding to help Chthon instead with the intent of turning upon him later. Or of ruling the worlds at his left hand."
"Right hand," Jan corrected.
Clint pulled the phone away from his mouth and turned slightly to face the rest of them. "No, he's an evil Chaos deity. It would be his left hand."
"Left-handed people aren't automatically evil, you know," Tony said, knowing it was off topic but unable to resist making the protest. Especially since, from Clint, it was probably an intentional attempt at being annoying, since he knew how irritating baseless superstitions were and couldn't possible have forgotten that Tony was the only left-handed person in the room.
"No, but left and counterclockwise have symbolic importance in more than one system of magic, left hands are ritually unclean in multiple cultures, and this is not important." Wanda stabbed a finger at Clint reprovingly, and he turned back to his phone conversation, shifting to put his back to them again.
Steve was frowning, his eyebrows drawn together in a way that was usually endearing but that, right now, was just irritating. He was going to be stubborn about this. Damn it. "We can't just hand Loki that kind of power," he said. "God knows what she'd do with it. She might not be as evil as Chthon, but she's a lot less predictable."
"Well, we know she probably won't destroy the world with it," Tony pointed out, his voice sharper than he'd meant it to be.
Thor gave him a dismissive glance, his eyes narrowed and full of almost palpable contempt. "It seems you are skilled at choosing lesser evils."
Tony winced, wanting automatically to deny it – wanting to deny anything that Thor said to him in that tone of voice – but knowing that it was true. He wasn't especially proud of it, but the ability to follow through on the most practical or effective course of action was vital in the business world as well as in politics and superheroing, and someone had to be the pragmatic one. "This has nothing to do with that," he said, instead. "Steve, will you just compromise for once? Sometimes surviving is more important than principles. We don't have to actually give Loki the spear; just give her the impression that we'd be willing to if she helped us first."
Wanda opened her mouth to speak, but Steve beat her to it.
"This isn't about principles," he said shortly, blue eyes boring into Tony. "This is about not relying on people you know you can't trust."
"We can handle Loki," Tony protested. "We've done it before."
Steve's jaw tightened. "You always think you can handle things. Some things, some people, are too dangerous to control."
Tony drew a deep breath in through his nose, staring at the wall just beyond Steve's head and trying to ignore the frustrated tension creeping up the back of his neck. Someone had tacked an 'endangered raptors of North America' calendar up on one wall, where Steve's pen and ink sketch of the Manhattan skyline had once hung; otherwise, the walls were still as bare as they had been after the SHRA had been passed and Steve had been gone, when Tony had pulled all of the pictures in the apartment down.
He felt silly about that now, especially after weeks spent looking at the bare, unfinished walls of the Avengers Mansion as it was slowly rebuilt. Spending months living in a house with no pictures on the walls was not normal, but by the time he'd actually noticed how barren the apartment suite looked, Steve had been back for almost a month, and the boxes with the pictures in them were sitting in the middle of a dozen other boxes of Steve's things, waiting for him to unpack them.
He shouldn't be fighting with Steve, not over this. They'd just barely started unpacking. He shouldn't-
His chest felt tight, as if the air in the room lacked sufficient oxygen.
"Captain America is right," Thor was saying. "We must-"
"Remember what happened the last time we tried working with supervillains?" Hank interrupted.
"This is not the same as Registration!" Tony snapped, finally losing control over his temper. "And even if it were, compromise was the safest course of action then, and it's the best one now."
Steve slammed a hand down on the edge of the table, the sturdy wood absorbing the impact with a dull thud. "If we let Loki get her hands on that spear, everything she does with it will be our fault." His voice had risen until it was halfway to a shout, his face flushing red.
"You think I don't know that?" Why was it so hard to breathe? His chest was starting to hurt, a sharp, familiar pain. "I'll take full responsibility for it if you want," he said, flinging his hands up angrily. "A little more blood on my hands is nothing next to saving the world." How would one even tell where the old stains left off and the new ones started, at this point?
Steve closed his eyes for a second, and took a deep breath, obviously trying to hold onto his temper. "You can't take responsibility for this, Tony. It's everyone's decision, not just yours."
"No," Thor said firmly. "It is my decision. And I have already decided that my answer is no."
"This is something that affects all of us," Wanda said. "It isn't just a personal family problem of yours, any more than Magneto was for me and– for me and Pietro."
Everyone seemed to be talking at once, then, raised voices overlapping and blurring into one another.
"Of course she'll stab us in the back," Hank was insisting, one hand flailing angrily through the air. "Supervillains always stab you in the back. Then you're left rotting in jail for their crimes, or trying to talk them out of cloning dead Initiative members as science projects."
"If we try to blackmail or manipulate Loki into helping us without delivering payment, she's going to try and kill us all." Sam's voice, less angry than the others.
"She cannot be trusted!" Thor's shout set the dishes rattling in the cabinets. "I will not ally myself with yet another who has betrayed me. There is a limit to my forbearance!"
"I'm trying to talk to Carol, will you guys shut up?"
"Calm down, big guy." Jan laid a hand on Thor's arm, only to receive an icy glare in return. "Tony wasn't suggesting we trust her-"
"Which is what makes it such a bad idea," Steve interrupted. "If I thought you were being naïve – but you know how dangerous she is. I thought we were finished with you putting yourself in dangerous situations because you think you—"
"This isn't about me," Tony defended. The kitchen felt much too small, too loud, and none of the rest of them were listening. Old instincts kicked in, reminding him not to let his struggle for breath or the twinges in his chest show. 'Breathe, don't lose it, make them think there's nothing wrong with you.' "If Chthon breaks free and we have to fight him alone, we're doomed."
"–I don't think–"
"–you always–"
"—she has forfeited the right to my aid, and—"
"Damn it, Tony, we talked about this!"
"—how many shall die this time, through your foolhardiness?"
Tony stood up abruptly, his chair nearly toppling over – he grabbed for it, gripping the hard wooden back tightly for a moment. "I'm not doing this right now," he forced out.
The walk to the kitchen door took ages, despite the claustrophobic smallness of the room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Steve stand, moving to follow him, saw Sam and Clint block Steve's path, Sam saying something to him in a low voice.
The words made no sense, the rushing sound in his ears turning them into meaningless, barely audible noise. The edges of his vision were blurred and grey, and suddenly he was in the hallway, leaning against the wall and trying to keep his hands from shaking, not entirely certain how he'd gotten there.
What the hell was wrong with him?
Was he having some kind of bizarre panic attack over fighting with Steve? That made no sense; this wasn't the first time they'd argued about something since Steve had come back, and if he were going to completely lose it like this, surely he would have done it weeks ago, back when he'd still been waking up each morning from dreams that Steve was still dead.
Tony closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing, pressing one hand against the ache in his chest and letting the wall hold him up. He didn't have panic attacks. He'd been blown up, tortured, shot, gone under the knife for open heart surgery, and come out the other side of all of it still perfectly able to function under pressure.
Some kind of after effect of A.I.M.'s fear toxin, activated by adrenaline? He'd been exposed to it nearly a month ago, but with A.I.M., that didn't necessarily mean anything. He should ask Hank to check him out later, to make sure he didn't have some trace amount of it still lurking in his system. Should check with Jan to make sure she hadn't experienced anything similar.
"Are you okay?"
Tony looked up with a jerk to see Jan standing a foot or so away from him, examining him intently. How had she gotten there without him hearing anything?
"I'm," he began, starting to tell her that he was fine, and then stopped. "I don't know." He drew in a deep breath, feeling marginally less shaky, and balled his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. His hands never shook. Even when he'd been drinking himself to sleep every night and hungover every morning, they'd always been rock steady when he needed them to be. "Yelling at Steve and Thor wouldn't have helped anything. I didn't want to- The last time I got into an actual fight with Steve, I broke his jaw."
Jan winced, looking away. "That was a little different than this," she said. "And I've never seen you take your anger out on someone else physically. On lab equipment maybe, but not on people."
Tony tried to smile. "I have a lot more expensive equipment than I have friends."
Jan offered him a small smile in return. "That's not saying much. I've seen your lab."
'Calm', he told himself. 'You're fine. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with Steve. Suck it up, Shellhead, and be an Avenger, and not Tony Stark losing it because he got into a fight with his boyfriend.' He'd always been able to do that before, and when he couldn't, he'd known that it was time to take the armor off and give it to Rhodey.
"I think Steve can handle you arguing with him," Jan was saying. "It's good for him. And accepting Loki's help isn't out of the question as a last-ditch solution, but I don't think things are that desperate yet."
"Not yet," Tony agreed, "but we can't afford to have her as an enemy right now, either."
"I'm not sure we can afford to have her as an ally, either," Jan said. She patted him on the arm, and added, "Try to keep it together, okay? It's hard enough keeping this team functional as it is, between Thor and Hank and Carol's issues with Wanda."
"I'm fine," he said, and it wasn't entirely a lie. He could breathe easily again; the tightness and twinges in his chest had faded almost to nothing now, leaving just the faintly jittery aftermath of an adrenaline overload and a hot prickle of embarrassment.
Chthon and Loki and the threat they both represented were far more important than his personal problems, whatever those were.
There was a loud thud from inside the kitchen, probably Thor slamming a fist down on the table again, and he and Jan both jumped a little at the sound. "Let's go back inside before the big guy breaks something," Tony suggested.
Then he braced himself, put on a smile, and followed Jan back into the room.
* * *
Thor practically stomped out of the kitchen, his back a stiff, straight line. No one was completely happy with the decision the team had reached, but Thor in particular had never been inclined to compromise when he was angry.
The Avengers were not going to contact Loki, or accept her help, and under no circumstances would she be getting her spear back. However, if she contacted them, they were all going to play nice, Thor included, and do their best not to give her a reason to fight them. Tony was right about that much, at least; they couldn't afford to fight a battle on two fronts right now, not when everything they had still might not be enough to face Chthon.
He had, Steve reflected, just told a god to be on his best behavior. Thor was not likely to take kindly to that at the moment, not where Loki was involved.
Knowing that Tony's "let's talk to Loki and see what she means by 'help us'" plan had been voted down five-to-three—Wanda's vote in favor hadn't technically counted—wouldn't make the need to smile and be polite, or at least not openly hostile, the next time she appeared any easier to swallow.
"I'm just saying, it can't hurt to keep our options open." Sam watched Thor go, frowning thoughtfully. "You saw what that thing did to Dr. Strange."
Clint half-raised one hand. "I didn't, actually."
"Take my word for it," Jan said. "It was intimidating."
Which was presumably why she'd voted to accept Loki's assistance, alongside Sam and Tony. Neither her vote nor Sam's had been as surprising as Hank's resounding vote against, but when he thought about it, Steve supposed it made sense. Hank had been burned – badly – by supervillains before; Jan was nothing if not practical, the flighty persona she liked to put on notwithstanding; and Sam was more than able to grit his teeth and work with people he disliked if he thought it would serve the greater good.
Tony... Tony's arguments almost always made sense, even when they were wrong. It was his reactions just now that Steve didn't know how to interpret.
He understood storming out of a fight because you were too angry not to do or say something stupid if you stayed, but Tony hadn't looked angry when he'd left. He'd looked... strange. Upset. Steve had wondered for a half-second if he'd just been informed of some kind of disaster via the Extremis. Then he'd come back in with Jan, only a few minutes later, and appeared perfectly calm and in control. Reasonable. Willing to accept the team's decision, but with that tightness around his eyes that said he wasn't entirely happy with it.
He'd been upset, visibly so, and then he'd been fine – or had looked fine. Steve had learned to tell the difference between Tony actually being calm and in control, and Tony forcing a false smile and faking it.
Tony was staring after Thor as well, eyes on the empty doorway. Nothing but a faint frown showed on his face, but his eyes held something close to the empty, damaged look they'd had just after Steve had come back. Not regret, precisely, or shame, or hurt, but some complicated combination of the three, probably with a sizable helping of guilt and self-loathing to round it out, Tony being Tony.
Hank, significantly less skilled at hiding his emotions, had left even before Thor had, storming out of the room with his head held high, determinedly not looking at the rest of them.
"You need to do something about Thor and Hank and Tony," Sam said in an undertone, following Steve's gaze to where Tony sat staring into space. Wanda sat next to him, looking as if she were debating putting one gloved hand on his arm; she seemed to wear her gloves more often since her return, even, as now, when she wasn't in costume.
"You can't tell me that fight just now wasn't about more than just Loki," Sam went on.
It was nothing Steve didn't already know, but, "Why me?" Given that he was hardly uninvolved in the situation, he doubted Thor would welcome any further interference. He'd done his best to stay neutral, and not let his feelings for Tony influence him – not when Thor had a serious and legitimate grievance – but...
Sam was right; he'd known for weeks that he was probably going to have to intervene eventually, before the teams' communication problems came back to bite them in the ass in the field. He'd just hoped he wouldn't have to.
"You're in charge," Clint said, as if it were self-evident.
"I don't solve Hank's problems for him." Jan wrinkled her nose, and added, "I doubt the big guy would listen to me, anyway. I was there when the cloning happened, and I didn't do anything to stop it."
Steve would have said something to that – agreed, probably, or pointed out that Hank's problem had the potential to become everyone's problem if it led to a communications breakdown in the middle of fight – but then Tony said something quietly to Wanda and stood, moving quickly and smoothly toward the door as if he hoped to quietly slip out of the kitchen without Steve noticing.
He was probably going to go hide in the basement lab, where he would stay holed up for hours, not emerging until either Steve, Pepper, or Jarvis dragged him out.
Steve nodded distractedly at Jan and followed Tony out into the hallway.
Unsurprisingly, he was headed toward the elevator, its doors already sliding open for him accommodatingly.
"Tony."
Tony stopped, half-turning to look at Steve. "I have a project for Rhodey to work on. His new shoulder gun keeps jamming, and he wants me to-"
Steve cut him off before he could get any further with his attempt at evasion. "I need to talk to you."
Tony turned to face him fully, holding his hands up, palms out. "You're right," he said quickly. "I shouldn't have walked out of a meeting like that, informal or not. It was about Loki, not about you and me."
Steve moved closer, taking hold of Tony's wrists, and gently pulling his hands down. "That's not what I want to talk about." He hesitated, then decided to be blunt. Subtle hints rarely succeeded in getting Tony to talk about whatever was bothering him. "Are you... all right? You looked-"
"I'm fine," Tony interrupted, tugging his hands free.
Steve let go, backing off a step, and watched as Tony visibly struggled for words.
"I just..." he started, then stopped, shaking his head. "I don't like fighting with you. With Thor. Not about important things."
He might not like it, but that had never stopped him from doing it – Tony had always been willing to stick to his planned course of action with maddening stubbornness if he thought it was necessary, even when said course of action was self-destructive and morally questionable. If he truly believed that an alliance with Loki was the only way to save the world, he would walk into the cathedral and pick up the spear himself to bring it out to her. Or he would have at least kept arguing a lot longer. The near-fight in the kitchen was probably as much about Tony's ingrained habit of playing devil's advocate as anything else.
Steve had missed that, he realized. Tony had only given in when his suggestion had been officially voted down by half the team. He hadn't just conceded and agreed to go along with whatever Steve wanted. He'd visibly flinched at Thor's anger, and the accusation that his poor decisions had cost lives, but he'd looked the rest of them straight in the eyes and argued his point, without apologies.
Granted, an apology or two more to Thor might go a long way towards smoothing things over, but...
All things considered, he preferred arrogantly-sure-he-was-right, it's-all-my-responsibility-let-me-decide-FOR-you Tony to apologetic, broken Tony. It was just wrong to see Tony unsure of himself.
He didn't say that, though, not quite.
"I know," Steve told Tony. "I'm glad you did, though. You haven't told me that I'm a naïve, unrealistic boy scout in months."
Tony blinked, expression uncertain for second, then smiled. It was only a little forced. "That's because you usually aren't one. I only have to remind you that there are options you're not considering once in a while."
"When I won't consider an option, there's usually a reason for that," Steve said dryly.
"Blind stubbornness?" Tony suggested, raising his eyebrows.
"Morals," Steve said firmly. "Ethics. The Geneva Convention. Or the fact that a lot of your plans involve disturbingly high chances of you blowing up."
"That lightning the other week would not have blown me up." The elevator doors began to close, and without looking, Tony thrust a hand between them, keeping them open. "The armor's designed to handle power overloads without exploding."
"Electrocuted, then," Steve said. He stepped forward and wrapped his hand around the edge of the elevator door. "Here, I'll come down to the lab with you. Maybe I can help." Tony was unlikely to need his assistance with anything technological, but Steve wasn't going to let him hide in the basement by himself for the rest of the day. He would end up spending hours down there, not bothering to come upstairs to eat, and Steve wouldn't see him again until tomorrow night; the Avengers' labs always had a cot or sofa shoved into a corner somewhere, testament to both Tony and Hank's screwed-up working and sleeping patterns.
Tony shook his head. "I don't need any help," he said, the teasing note gone from his voice now. "Look, I have things to do. I'll be back upstairs for dinner, all right?"
Tony was still angry, obviously, even if he was making an effort to hide it. He'd never objected to Steve's presence in his lab before. "Well, I don't have things to do, so I might as well come. I can hand you tools."
"You can watch," Tony corrected. He grinned, then, as Steve followed him into the elevator. "You're just hoping I'll let you test Rhodey's shoulder cannon, aren't you?"
Steve seized on it as the olive branch it was. "You mean, hoping I'll get to fire a gun the size of Spiderman? Actually, no. I just wanted to watch you get covered in sweat and engine grease." On the other hand... "But now that you mention it..."
Tony shook his head. That momentary grin was gone, but so was the tension that had been holding his shoulders rigid. "I'm at the disassembly stage now. There won't be any playing with guns for a while. Plus, it's part of Rhodey's armor. It would be like letting someone else play with your shield."
The doors started to slide closed. Moments before they shut completely, the cat came dashing through them, a low streak of orange fur.
He rubbed his head and side blissfully against Tony's ankles as the elevator started to descend, looking up at Steve with a smug expression in his huge blue eyes. 'Mine,' that expression said. 'I only tolerate you.'
The cat was going to come with them to the Mansion eventually, Steve suspected. He'd only ever been Jarvis's pet in name – he slept on Steve and Tony's bed, played with Clint, and begged for food from the entire team. It had taken him about two days to figure out that Thor was a particularly soft touch.
Thor. Steve's newly regained good mood deflated a little. "You need to talk to Thor," he said quietly, the words sounding stiff and awkward to his own ears. Usually, balancing his relationship with Tony with their responsibilities as Avengers was, if not easy, then at least not especially hard. They'd reformed the team together, fought to end the SHRA together, and Steve had quietly decided that he wasn't going to let anything, be it supervillains, government interference, possession or experimental drugs, or either of their own nightmares get in the way of that again.
And he wasn't, but that didn't make trying to play peacemaker between his... lover? boyfriend? All the words he knew for it sounded silly – and one of his oldest friends any easier.
Tony's body language stiffened up again as soon as he said Thor's name. "I already did," he said, ignoring the hoarse, creaky purr that now emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles. "Apologizing again won't change what we did." He sounded resigned, tired.
Well, no, apologizing didn't undo the past, but, "Try it anyway," Steve suggested. "The way Thor sees it, an innocent man died at... not exactly his hands, but close enough that he feels dishonored by it. You know what that feels like. I've seen your face when reporters throw those questions about landmines and unexploded munitions at you."
"That's different," Tony said. "That actually is my responsibility. Just like the clone was. Thor did nothing; he just got caught in the fallout from another weapon I lost control of, one I shouldn't have allowed myself to be forced into making in the first place. And he's got just as much right to be angry at me as any of the people those landmines and missiles have hurt." He studied the smooth, polished brass of the elevator doors intently, as if searching for something in his own distorted reflection. Or avoiding Steve's eyes. "What use would another apology be when he doesn't trust my word anymore?"
So he was letting it drop, Steve guessed, waiting for Thor to slowly come around when he saw Tony being a good teammate, trying to work with him, and generally not being a mad scientist. Try hard enough, be smart enough, plan well enough, do things right, and success was inevitable – it was virtually Tony's motto, along with the assumption that if he wasn't successful, it was his fault for not foreseeing whatever had gone wrong and preventing it.
Sometimes it even worked. Maybe this would be one of those times – maybe Thor would eventually come around as Tony proved to him that his apology hadn't just been empty words.
If so, Steve hoped it happened before Chthon showed up on their doorstep.
* * *
The Avengers Mansion's white façade was entirely complete now, the late afternoon sunlight turning the pale stonework reddish-gold. From the air, the remains of the damage to the grounds were all too visible, but were it not for the crater still waiting to be filled in in the lawn and the half-dead remains of the gardens, the building itself would have looked untouched, as if it had stood there on the corner of Fifth and 70th unmolested since before the first world war.
This was actually the second time it had been rebuilt – the architects and construction company had done a very good job. How much, Carol wondered, had Tony had to bribe the Landmarks Preservation Commission in order to build an exact copy of the original building instead of some modern 'update' of it?
However much he'd spent, it had been worth it; getting the outside of the building completed in three months was nearly miraculous in New York, where scaffolding often clung to the outsides of buildings for years.
After nearly four straight hours in the air, it was a welcome sight.
Carol landed on the lawn, avoiding the crater, and turned to wave at the security camera she knew was there. If the old defense system had been back online, she would have been dodging lasers all the way to the ground, but as it was, nothing greeted her but stillness and silence. The construction crew still working on the interiors had obviously gone home for the day.
If her urgent return to the East Coast hadn't been prompted by an apparent lapse of sanity on Tony's part, she might almost have been grateful for the excuse to leave LA. The trip... hadn't gone well, though it hadn't been as bad as she had feared. She'd expected shouting and bitter fighting and that she'd leave miserable. She'd gotten the shouting in spades, but if anything she felt... slightly better for it, actually. Not better enough to want to stick around and keep doing it, but better.
Arguing with Jessica was a lot more cathartic without the worry that this would be the time Carol finally went too far and lost her for good. With less to lose, there was less to fight about.
Maybe Jessica had been right to want to call a halt to things before it stopped being fun. They had worked just fine as friends who occasionally hooked up before the SHRA had passed. And friends who were willing to forgive you some of the things Carol had pulled when she'd been drinking, and put up with the dysfunctional mess she'd been after she'd come out of the coma were harder to come by than gorgeous women with sex pheromone powers who were great in bed.
Really. She just had to keep telling herself that.
Simon had made his sappily sweet fling with Henry Hellrung official shortly before Carol's first trip back East, the one that had ended in poison gas attacks and mass hysteria. Apparently, she and Jessica couldn't compete with the seductive power inherent in Hellrung's encyclopedic command of classic cinema, and Simon had amicably ended their relationship in favor of living in domestic bliss with the Disney Channel version of Tony Stark.
Carol had started spending a lot of time in New York, then. She and Jessica argued more without Simon and his dislike of emotional conflict there to smooth things over, and make-up sex might be deeply satisfying, but it only went so far toward patching things up again after they'd both said things they regretted.
Jessica and Simon had been the first of Carol's lovers in a long time whom she could allow herself to get a little rough with, whom she didn't have to worry about accidentally hurting, but there were more ways to hurt someone than simply leaving too many bruises during over-enthusiastic sex.
They'd argued again this time, despite the lower stakes, over Wanda's return and Simon's refusal to come back to New York and see her. Hellrung was all for facing down your problems with a positive attitude, or at least with long-suffering endurance. Jessica, for once, had been in total agreement with him – she'd kept enough secrets in the rest of her life to prefer brutal honesty in relationships, she'd said.
Brutal honesty, Carol had learned, was a lot easier to dish out than it was to listen to.
Someone had needed to stick up for Simon. Jessica hadn't been there when Vision had died, when Wanda had tried to destroy them all. She didn't really understand how personal the betrayal had to be for Simon, who'd lost his entire remaining family in a single day. She thought he ought to be happy to have Wanda back, didn't see Wanda's madness as any different than what the Shadow King had done to her.
"She didn't choose it, Carol, anymore than you chose what Rogue did to you. Anymore than I chose to be his pawn and his plaything."
Vision, Scott, and Clint hadn't chosen to die, either, and Clint hadn't chosen to have sex with Wanda. Jessica, of all people, should have understood that. She knew what mind-control was like, what it was like to have your choices taken away from you. Wanda was not the person one ought to be feeling sorry for here.
No one answered when Carol rang the doorbell, but knowing Tony, he was just as likely to be walled up in some soundproof workshop, completely oblivious to anything that wasn't either mechanical or electronic.
She could come back later. It would give her a chance to shower, change clothes, relax for a while after hours of flying. She could sit around with Jan and rant about exes who thought they knew what was best for you and were distractingly sexy when they were angry. Jan had dated Tony once, so she ought to have experience in that department.
Or she could just let herself in. She hadn't flown at top speed all the way from LA to wait around for Tony to make room in his schedule for her. He had to have some rational justification for why he thought it was a good idea to accept help from supervillains after they'd just finished fixing the mess from the last time they'd done so, and she couldn't wait to hear it.
Complying with the SHRA had been necessary, both as the only viable way to exercise some degree of damage control, and because refusing to obey legitimate government legislation would have only made the public perception of superhumans worse – as the anti-Registration side's resistance, in fact, had.
Loki was not a representative of the US government, or anyone else they had any reason to respect, and had in point of fact tried to kill them all more than once. Trusting Wanda and letting her back onto the team – probationary Carol's ass, she was pretty much on the team again – was bad enough without accepting help from the overtly, self-admittedly evil.
She'd said as much to Clint, on the phone, but she doubted he'd relayed more than the barest gist of her words to the others. Probably just, "Ms. Marvel votes no, and she thinks you're crazy."
Carol pressed her thumb against the tiny biometric lock tucked discreetly into the corner of the door frame, and waited while it analyzed her fingerprint and possibly her DNA. After a moment, the door unlocked with an audible click, and for the first time in over a year, she was inside the Avengers Mansion.
There was no furniture in the front hall, but the staircase and the marble floor were the same. Untouched, this time, with no sign of the crack in the floor where Thor had once dropped his hammer, the uneven spots in the plasterwork where scratches and gouges had been filled in and painted over innumerable times. The smell of fresh paint and dry plaster dust was everywhere.
Her boots were loud against the bare marble floor, and louder still on the living room's wooden floorboards.
There was no one in there, either, but a fire had been laid in the fireplace, and either Steve or Tony had left a book lying on the coffee table, face down to keep their place in it.
The Maltese Falcon. It had been one of Vision's favorite books, she remembered, with a pang. He'd loved film noir and pulp detective novels, anything with trench coats and fedoras and hardboiled private eyes.
Carol frowned. Steve preferred the movie version of Sam Spade to the more ruthless and less soulful-eyed original, and Tony preferred his manly pulp novels to be of the James Bond variety.
There was a soft sound behind her, someone's shoes scuffing against the floor.
Carol turned sharply, feeling a flash of guilty embarrassment at being caught snooping through Steve or Tony's reading material.
"Wanda!" She felt her face heat, and hated it. Damn it, Wanda was staying here, too. How could she have forgotten?
"Carol," Wanda said, moving into the room. At least she looked uneasy, too. She was in civilian clothing, in dark colors, and her gloves were missing. The spiky black tattoos on the backs of her hands stood out in sharp relief, like a Shi-ar's facial markings.
She must have realized that Carol was staring, because after a moment, she pulled her hands back, letting the folds of her skirt hide them.
"They're not here," Wanda said, stiffly. "Cap and Tony are both out."
"Maybe you can explain what on earth Tony was thinking, then." It wasn't what she had intended to say – talking to Wanda at all was something she would prefer to avoid – but irritation overrode her better instincts, as it did too often. She had spent a good portion of her flight planning out exactly what she was going to say to Tony, one version for if she was able to get him alone, and another in case Steve was present; she hadn't wanted to call him on the carpet for poor decision-making in front of their team leader, boyfriend or no. Not unless it was necessary.
Wanda looked up, then, meeting her eyes levelly. "He was thinking the same thing I was," she said. "That Chthon may be too powerful for us to defeat on our own, should he break free, and that Loki is significantly less likely to try to destroy reality itself than Chthon is."
"That's the last thing I expected to hear from you," Carol told her. "If Strange is right, I'd think you would have had enough of evil chaos deities."
Wanda crossed her arms, the fabric of her blouse wrinkling, and said stiffly, "There's evil, and there's Chthon."
"Yes," Carol said. "And once upon a time, you wouldn't have sided with evil."
"I was a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants long before I was an Avenger."
Which was technically true, but, "That's not the same thing, and you know it."
"No." Wanda's voice was flat. "Siding with Magneto was my choice, even if it was a bad one."
And being possessed by Chthon hadn't been. However, exactly how much control Wanda had had over her actions while possessed was unclear – how much of what she'd done had been Chthon's influence, and how much had been her own subconscious desires? Or conscious ones?
'No more mutants.'
Who wished an entire group of people into extinction? How could you ever trust someone whose mind had harbored such a wish?
Carol folded her own arms, realized she was mirroring Wanda's body language, and unfolded them. "Lots of us have had our choices taken away," she said. "Most of us didn't kill people over it, or try to destroy the world." At the words, all of the anger she had felt at the time came back. The paperback she'd guiltily set back down on the coffee table stood out with painful clarity, the garish cover shouting the title in bright, block letters. Vision had died, if not precisely by Wanda's hands, then through her magic, and now she was sitting right there in the very building she'd destroyed, reading his favorite book. There was something obscene about it, and Carol felt a sudden urge to snatch the book away and take it back to LA with her, to give it to Simon, who had far more right to Vision's memory than the person responsible for his death.
She narrowed her eyes at Wanda. "Tony feels guilty about what happened to you. He's clearly overcompensating. Thor wasn't here to see what you did. Steve forgives everyone, eventually." Even Tony, who had fought with him so bitterly. Even Sharon Carter, who had shot him – not intentionally, true, but a lot of men wouldn't have seen past the fact of the bullet. "But I don't understand Clint forgiving you. Not after what you did to him. I don't see how he can stand to be in the same room as you." That, even more then the rest of this, made no sense. In her experience, men were more likely to shrug off being taken sexual advantage of than women were; she'd known at least a half a dozen guys in the Air Force who'd had sex they didn't remember while drunk, and the greatest source of trauma – that they'd admitted to, anyway – seemed to be the women involved's lack of perceived attractiveness. But Clint had been visibly upset, when he'd told her about it, afraid he'd taken advantage of Wanda, blaming himself for not resisting, for not bringing her back with him. And yet he hadn't said a word against allowing her to come back.
"That's between me and Clint." Wanda's voice rose sharply as she spoke, the words sounding strained, defensive, as if she truly felt guilty. Good. She ought to. "I brought him back as soon as I could. He's one of my oldest friends—do you think I wouldn't do anything to be able to do the same with Vision?"
Carol looked away from Wanda's tight, set face, and the suspicious shine in her eyes, to the living room's bare floors, their finish still glossy and untouched. "Yeah, you cared about them so much that you tried to kill them to, what, punish us for the fact that you lost your children? Was that how Chthon got you to do it?" Wanda flinched, her shoulders hunching up defensively, but Carol pressed on, almost glad to be hurting the other woman. "You got inside our heads! You used our worst weaknesses against us. Chthon couldn't have known those things." Making Jen lose control of her powers, shoving Tony off the wagon; those were personal attacks, the kind of thing someone did when they wanted to hurt someone they knew well as badly as possible. It would have made no sense for Chthon to have attacked the Avengers that way – they were nothing but pawns to him. Using Wanda's powers to slaughter them all without the cat-toying-with-a-mouse build up would have been more efficient.
And yet no one else seemed to see that. Even Simon didn't want to believe it, though in his case, she could understand why. Better to believe that Vision's death had been due entirely to some external force than to any part of the woman he and Vision had both loved. At least that way he could keep his memories of both of them untainted – which was, she suspected, part of the reason he was so reluctant to see Wanda now.
Wanda's hands were balled into fists now, her back stiff and her eyes glittering. She stared at Carol with her chin up, jaw set as if she were bracing herself for a blow. Carol wasn't going to give her the satisfaction – if nothing else, she would probably break Wanda's jaw if she let herself hit her, and it would probably get her kicked off the team again. And even if it didn't, beating an unarmed woman who didn't have superstrength would be the actions of a bully, and Carol wasn't going to sink that low.
"I didn't do it on purpose!" Wanda's voice was rough, almost shrill. "Clint knows that. Tony and Cap know that. I've tried to tell Simon, but he won't talk to me – your girlfriend hung up on me when I called."
Good for Jessica. That must have been before she'd decided that Simon needed to hear what Wanda had to say.
The core of the Avengers, the ones who'd been on the team the longest – Steve, Tony, Hank, Jan, Thor, Clint, Wanda – always got extra leeway with one another. It wasn't surprising, given how long they'd known each other, but it wasn't always a good thing, either. If Carol had pulled half the things Hank had... Or Tony, who seemed to go out of his way to fuck himself over. And yet they'd both been forgiven, just as Wanda had. On the other hand, neither of them had killed a teammate, though Hank had apparently come close.
Carol had never been able to stay on a team long enough to earn that – first there was Marcus, then she'd lost her Binary powers and had to leave the Starjammers, and then she'd fucked up her shot at the Avengers again with the drinking, and then she left the Avengers to work for the government once she'd earned her slot back. And she'd enjoyed the work, before the SHRA started, but... On the other hand, if she'd been given that kind of easy forgiveness, she might still be drinking. Or maybe they'd all have put up more of a fight to stop her from going off with Marcus.
Thank god Wanda and Chthon hadn't used those particular memories against her. They could have, so easily. If the whole thing had gone on a little longer, another of Marcus's dopplegangers might even have shown up, drawn there by deliberately created bad luck and altered chance.
She stabbed a finger at Wanda, and had the satisfaction of seeing her flinch back. "How can we ever trust you again? I get hauled off to another dimension by a rapist and no one lifts a finger, but they welcome you back with open arms? You should be locked up somewhere where you can't hurt anybody else," she spat, "not back on the team."
Wanda's eyes narrowed. "I was locked up!" she shouted. "On Mount Wundagore, for months. I'm still locked up now." She brandished her tattooed hands, all but waving them in Carol's face. "What do you think these are? Locks, on my power, to keep me from drawing enough to let Chthon take me again. To keep me safe."
"Safe," Carol repeated. "You mean, like Strange was safe?" Even at her worst, even when she'd been drinking, her problems had never caused anyone else to be hurt. She had come close once or twice, avoiding it only by luck – Tony could have been injured badly, that time she'd thrown him through the wing of a plane, or the airliner itself could have crashed – but nothing like the trail of collateral damage Wanda's possession by Chthon was leaving, even now.
Wanda shook her head sharply. "I didn't mean for that to happen! I thought if I went to Strange, I'd be safe, that he had enough power to defend himself if Chthon took me over again. I didn't want any of this. The last thing I remember is going to find Jen, and Cap says that was weeks before everything else happened. I was under Chthon's control for months, without anyone noticing, just like Tony and Immortus. Do you think I wanted that? That I wanted Agatha to die, or Scott, or Vi-vision." She stumbled over Vision's name, and looked away, eyes going to the coffee table. "I wanted someone to stop me," she said, more quietly. "I asked Xavier to, and he wouldn't." For a moment, she sounded almost bitter, but then her shoulders slumped slightly, and her voice just sounded tired as she added, "We never seem to notice when one of us needs help."
No, Carol thought. And when we do notice, and we usually manage to make things worse. The way Tony had when he'd gotten her kicked off the team over the drinking problem she'd barely even had yet. Or we try when it's too late.
"You're right," she said. "We didn't notice that anything was wrong until it was too late. This time we already know you're compromised. This time, if anything happens, it will be our fault for letting our guard down."
"Fine!" Wanda's hands made an angry slashing motion. "Do that. I want you to do that! The others all treat me like I'm either a victim or a timebomb, but none of them would do anything about it if I needed to be taken out. None of them could."
Carol raised her eyebrows. "Don't underestimate Tony. Or Hank. It would destroy them, but they'd do it."
"That," Wanda snapped. "That's why we considered an alliance with Loki. Because sometimes things you know could destroy you are worth it. Sometimes you need to do what's necessary even if it might hurt you."
'Like wipe your species off the face of the earth?' "I know. I've done that. It ended up with Steve dead and Tony suicidal and half of us hating the other half." Carol narrowed her eyes and pointed at Wanda. "Tell Tony I want to talk to him," she added, grimly.
"Fine. I will." Wanda stepped aside, pointedly moving out of the path to the door. "Don't break the door on your way out."
Carol didn't – in fact, she made an effort to shut the front door as gently as possible, before flying away to find something acceptable to hit.
* * *
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
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 kitchen in Stark Tower's penthouse was not large enough to comfortably accommodate eight people, but the kitchen was where the team had always gathered to hold discussions too informal to have around a council room table, so once Loki had left and the men and women who had fled the building to huddle in little knots on the sidewalk outside had all come back in, and the police had been assured that there was no need for their presence, the kitchen was where everyone went.
The room was full of the sound of too many people speaking too loudly, all at once. Hank was apologizing to Jan for not getting back from wherever he'd stormed off to in time to help confront Loki. Wanda was protesting to Sam that she and Clint should have been told about Loki's arrival immediately, and that she couldn't help them if she didn't know what was going on. Clint was on the phone with the West Coast Avengers, filling Carol in. And Tony was making a thus far unsuccessful attempt to get Steve and Thor to see reason.
"I think we sent her away too soon," he said, for the second time. "We should have heard her out."
"Loki's words are oft as dangerous as her actions," Thor said flatly. He was actually talking to Tony now, Loki's appearance having presumably provided the distraction of someone he hated even more.
"Loki's still more of a known quantity than Chthon is," Tony countered. "Yes, obviously, she'll try to stab us in the back, but if she helps us defeat Chthon first, then whatever treachery we have to deal with afterwards will be the lesser of two evils. We're majorly outclassed in terms of magical firepower right now." He turned to Steve, who could be counted on to be practical when it came to tactics. "You saw what Chthon did to Strange. If we try and fight both him and Loki at the same time, we're going to lose both battles."
"I hate to admit it," Sam said, turning away from Wanda and joining the conversation, "but that is actually a good point."
There was silence as everyone considered this, and Clint's too-loud words into the cordless phone he was holding between his shoulder and right ear were clearly audible for a moment. "Get back to New York, okay? This is more important than your booty call with Spider-Woman. I thought you guys were 'taking a break from each other' anyway."
"Loki despises us all utterly and is naturally aligned with Chaos," Thor rumbled. "There is nothing to stay her from deciding to help Chthon instead with the intent of turning upon him later. Or of ruling the worlds at his left hand."
"Right hand," Jan corrected.
Clint pulled the phone away from his mouth and turned slightly to face the rest of them. "No, he's an evil Chaos deity. It would be his left hand."
"Left-handed people aren't automatically evil, you know," Tony said, knowing it was off topic but unable to resist making the protest. Especially since, from Clint, it was probably an intentional attempt at being annoying, since he knew how irritating baseless superstitions were and couldn't possible have forgotten that Tony was the only left-handed person in the room.
"No, but left and counterclockwise have symbolic importance in more than one system of magic, left hands are ritually unclean in multiple cultures, and this is not important." Wanda stabbed a finger at Clint reprovingly, and he turned back to his phone conversation, shifting to put his back to them again.
Steve was frowning, his eyebrows drawn together in a way that was usually endearing but that, right now, was just irritating. He was going to be stubborn about this. Damn it. "We can't just hand Loki that kind of power," he said. "God knows what she'd do with it. She might not be as evil as Chthon, but she's a lot less predictable."
"Well, we know she probably won't destroy the world with it," Tony pointed out, his voice sharper than he'd meant it to be.
Thor gave him a dismissive glance, his eyes narrowed and full of almost palpable contempt. "It seems you are skilled at choosing lesser evils."
Tony winced, wanting automatically to deny it – wanting to deny anything that Thor said to him in that tone of voice – but knowing that it was true. He wasn't especially proud of it, but the ability to follow through on the most practical or effective course of action was vital in the business world as well as in politics and superheroing, and someone had to be the pragmatic one. "This has nothing to do with that," he said, instead. "Steve, will you just compromise for once? Sometimes surviving is more important than principles. We don't have to actually give Loki the spear; just give her the impression that we'd be willing to if she helped us first."
Wanda opened her mouth to speak, but Steve beat her to it.
"This isn't about principles," he said shortly, blue eyes boring into Tony. "This is about not relying on people you know you can't trust."
"We can handle Loki," Tony protested. "We've done it before."
Steve's jaw tightened. "You always think you can handle things. Some things, some people, are too dangerous to control."
Tony drew a deep breath in through his nose, staring at the wall just beyond Steve's head and trying to ignore the frustrated tension creeping up the back of his neck. Someone had tacked an 'endangered raptors of North America' calendar up on one wall, where Steve's pen and ink sketch of the Manhattan skyline had once hung; otherwise, the walls were still as bare as they had been after the SHRA had been passed and Steve had been gone, when Tony had pulled all of the pictures in the apartment down.
He felt silly about that now, especially after weeks spent looking at the bare, unfinished walls of the Avengers Mansion as it was slowly rebuilt. Spending months living in a house with no pictures on the walls was not normal, but by the time he'd actually noticed how barren the apartment suite looked, Steve had been back for almost a month, and the boxes with the pictures in them were sitting in the middle of a dozen other boxes of Steve's things, waiting for him to unpack them.
He shouldn't be fighting with Steve, not over this. They'd just barely started unpacking. He shouldn't-
His chest felt tight, as if the air in the room lacked sufficient oxygen.
"Captain America is right," Thor was saying. "We must-"
"Remember what happened the last time we tried working with supervillains?" Hank interrupted.
"This is not the same as Registration!" Tony snapped, finally losing control over his temper. "And even if it were, compromise was the safest course of action then, and it's the best one now."
Steve slammed a hand down on the edge of the table, the sturdy wood absorbing the impact with a dull thud. "If we let Loki get her hands on that spear, everything she does with it will be our fault." His voice had risen until it was halfway to a shout, his face flushing red.
"You think I don't know that?" Why was it so hard to breathe? His chest was starting to hurt, a sharp, familiar pain. "I'll take full responsibility for it if you want," he said, flinging his hands up angrily. "A little more blood on my hands is nothing next to saving the world." How would one even tell where the old stains left off and the new ones started, at this point?
Steve closed his eyes for a second, and took a deep breath, obviously trying to hold onto his temper. "You can't take responsibility for this, Tony. It's everyone's decision, not just yours."
"No," Thor said firmly. "It is my decision. And I have already decided that my answer is no."
"This is something that affects all of us," Wanda said. "It isn't just a personal family problem of yours, any more than Magneto was for me and– for me and Pietro."
Everyone seemed to be talking at once, then, raised voices overlapping and blurring into one another.
"Of course she'll stab us in the back," Hank was insisting, one hand flailing angrily through the air. "Supervillains always stab you in the back. Then you're left rotting in jail for their crimes, or trying to talk them out of cloning dead Initiative members as science projects."
"If we try to blackmail or manipulate Loki into helping us without delivering payment, she's going to try and kill us all." Sam's voice, less angry than the others.
"She cannot be trusted!" Thor's shout set the dishes rattling in the cabinets. "I will not ally myself with yet another who has betrayed me. There is a limit to my forbearance!"
"I'm trying to talk to Carol, will you guys shut up?"
"Calm down, big guy." Jan laid a hand on Thor's arm, only to receive an icy glare in return. "Tony wasn't suggesting we trust her-"
"Which is what makes it such a bad idea," Steve interrupted. "If I thought you were being naïve – but you know how dangerous she is. I thought we were finished with you putting yourself in dangerous situations because you think you—"
"This isn't about me," Tony defended. The kitchen felt much too small, too loud, and none of the rest of them were listening. Old instincts kicked in, reminding him not to let his struggle for breath or the twinges in his chest show. 'Breathe, don't lose it, make them think there's nothing wrong with you.' "If Chthon breaks free and we have to fight him alone, we're doomed."
"–I don't think–"
"–you always–"
"—she has forfeited the right to my aid, and—"
"Damn it, Tony, we talked about this!"
"—how many shall die this time, through your foolhardiness?"
Tony stood up abruptly, his chair nearly toppling over – he grabbed for it, gripping the hard wooden back tightly for a moment. "I'm not doing this right now," he forced out.
The walk to the kitchen door took ages, despite the claustrophobic smallness of the room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Steve stand, moving to follow him, saw Sam and Clint block Steve's path, Sam saying something to him in a low voice.
The words made no sense, the rushing sound in his ears turning them into meaningless, barely audible noise. The edges of his vision were blurred and grey, and suddenly he was in the hallway, leaning against the wall and trying to keep his hands from shaking, not entirely certain how he'd gotten there.
What the hell was wrong with him?
Was he having some kind of bizarre panic attack over fighting with Steve? That made no sense; this wasn't the first time they'd argued about something since Steve had come back, and if he were going to completely lose it like this, surely he would have done it weeks ago, back when he'd still been waking up each morning from dreams that Steve was still dead.
Tony closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing, pressing one hand against the ache in his chest and letting the wall hold him up. He didn't have panic attacks. He'd been blown up, tortured, shot, gone under the knife for open heart surgery, and come out the other side of all of it still perfectly able to function under pressure.
Some kind of after effect of A.I.M.'s fear toxin, activated by adrenaline? He'd been exposed to it nearly a month ago, but with A.I.M., that didn't necessarily mean anything. He should ask Hank to check him out later, to make sure he didn't have some trace amount of it still lurking in his system. Should check with Jan to make sure she hadn't experienced anything similar.
"Are you okay?"
Tony looked up with a jerk to see Jan standing a foot or so away from him, examining him intently. How had she gotten there without him hearing anything?
"I'm," he began, starting to tell her that he was fine, and then stopped. "I don't know." He drew in a deep breath, feeling marginally less shaky, and balled his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. His hands never shook. Even when he'd been drinking himself to sleep every night and hungover every morning, they'd always been rock steady when he needed them to be. "Yelling at Steve and Thor wouldn't have helped anything. I didn't want to- The last time I got into an actual fight with Steve, I broke his jaw."
Jan winced, looking away. "That was a little different than this," she said. "And I've never seen you take your anger out on someone else physically. On lab equipment maybe, but not on people."
Tony tried to smile. "I have a lot more expensive equipment than I have friends."
Jan offered him a small smile in return. "That's not saying much. I've seen your lab."
'Calm', he told himself. 'You're fine. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with Steve. Suck it up, Shellhead, and be an Avenger, and not Tony Stark losing it because he got into a fight with his boyfriend.' He'd always been able to do that before, and when he couldn't, he'd known that it was time to take the armor off and give it to Rhodey.
"I think Steve can handle you arguing with him," Jan was saying. "It's good for him. And accepting Loki's help isn't out of the question as a last-ditch solution, but I don't think things are that desperate yet."
"Not yet," Tony agreed, "but we can't afford to have her as an enemy right now, either."
"I'm not sure we can afford to have her as an ally, either," Jan said. She patted him on the arm, and added, "Try to keep it together, okay? It's hard enough keeping this team functional as it is, between Thor and Hank and Carol's issues with Wanda."
"I'm fine," he said, and it wasn't entirely a lie. He could breathe easily again; the tightness and twinges in his chest had faded almost to nothing now, leaving just the faintly jittery aftermath of an adrenaline overload and a hot prickle of embarrassment.
Chthon and Loki and the threat they both represented were far more important than his personal problems, whatever those were.
There was a loud thud from inside the kitchen, probably Thor slamming a fist down on the table again, and he and Jan both jumped a little at the sound. "Let's go back inside before the big guy breaks something," Tony suggested.
Then he braced himself, put on a smile, and followed Jan back into the room.
Thor practically stomped out of the kitchen, his back a stiff, straight line. No one was completely happy with the decision the team had reached, but Thor in particular had never been inclined to compromise when he was angry.
The Avengers were not going to contact Loki, or accept her help, and under no circumstances would she be getting her spear back. However, if she contacted them, they were all going to play nice, Thor included, and do their best not to give her a reason to fight them. Tony was right about that much, at least; they couldn't afford to fight a battle on two fronts right now, not when everything they had still might not be enough to face Chthon.
He had, Steve reflected, just told a god to be on his best behavior. Thor was not likely to take kindly to that at the moment, not where Loki was involved.
Knowing that Tony's "let's talk to Loki and see what she means by 'help us'" plan had been voted down five-to-three—Wanda's vote in favor hadn't technically counted—wouldn't make the need to smile and be polite, or at least not openly hostile, the next time she appeared any easier to swallow.
"I'm just saying, it can't hurt to keep our options open." Sam watched Thor go, frowning thoughtfully. "You saw what that thing did to Dr. Strange."
Clint half-raised one hand. "I didn't, actually."
"Take my word for it," Jan said. "It was intimidating."
Which was presumably why she'd voted to accept Loki's assistance, alongside Sam and Tony. Neither her vote nor Sam's had been as surprising as Hank's resounding vote against, but when he thought about it, Steve supposed it made sense. Hank had been burned – badly – by supervillains before; Jan was nothing if not practical, the flighty persona she liked to put on notwithstanding; and Sam was more than able to grit his teeth and work with people he disliked if he thought it would serve the greater good.
Tony... Tony's arguments almost always made sense, even when they were wrong. It was his reactions just now that Steve didn't know how to interpret.
He understood storming out of a fight because you were too angry not to do or say something stupid if you stayed, but Tony hadn't looked angry when he'd left. He'd looked... strange. Upset. Steve had wondered for a half-second if he'd just been informed of some kind of disaster via the Extremis. Then he'd come back in with Jan, only a few minutes later, and appeared perfectly calm and in control. Reasonable. Willing to accept the team's decision, but with that tightness around his eyes that said he wasn't entirely happy with it.
He'd been upset, visibly so, and then he'd been fine – or had looked fine. Steve had learned to tell the difference between Tony actually being calm and in control, and Tony forcing a false smile and faking it.
Tony was staring after Thor as well, eyes on the empty doorway. Nothing but a faint frown showed on his face, but his eyes held something close to the empty, damaged look they'd had just after Steve had come back. Not regret, precisely, or shame, or hurt, but some complicated combination of the three, probably with a sizable helping of guilt and self-loathing to round it out, Tony being Tony.
Hank, significantly less skilled at hiding his emotions, had left even before Thor had, storming out of the room with his head held high, determinedly not looking at the rest of them.
"You need to do something about Thor and Hank and Tony," Sam said in an undertone, following Steve's gaze to where Tony sat staring into space. Wanda sat next to him, looking as if she were debating putting one gloved hand on his arm; she seemed to wear her gloves more often since her return, even, as now, when she wasn't in costume.
"You can't tell me that fight just now wasn't about more than just Loki," Sam went on.
It was nothing Steve didn't already know, but, "Why me?" Given that he was hardly uninvolved in the situation, he doubted Thor would welcome any further interference. He'd done his best to stay neutral, and not let his feelings for Tony influence him – not when Thor had a serious and legitimate grievance – but...
Sam was right; he'd known for weeks that he was probably going to have to intervene eventually, before the teams' communication problems came back to bite them in the ass in the field. He'd just hoped he wouldn't have to.
"You're in charge," Clint said, as if it were self-evident.
"I don't solve Hank's problems for him." Jan wrinkled her nose, and added, "I doubt the big guy would listen to me, anyway. I was there when the cloning happened, and I didn't do anything to stop it."
Steve would have said something to that – agreed, probably, or pointed out that Hank's problem had the potential to become everyone's problem if it led to a communications breakdown in the middle of fight – but then Tony said something quietly to Wanda and stood, moving quickly and smoothly toward the door as if he hoped to quietly slip out of the kitchen without Steve noticing.
He was probably going to go hide in the basement lab, where he would stay holed up for hours, not emerging until either Steve, Pepper, or Jarvis dragged him out.
Steve nodded distractedly at Jan and followed Tony out into the hallway.
Unsurprisingly, he was headed toward the elevator, its doors already sliding open for him accommodatingly.
"Tony."
Tony stopped, half-turning to look at Steve. "I have a project for Rhodey to work on. His new shoulder gun keeps jamming, and he wants me to-"
Steve cut him off before he could get any further with his attempt at evasion. "I need to talk to you."
Tony turned to face him fully, holding his hands up, palms out. "You're right," he said quickly. "I shouldn't have walked out of a meeting like that, informal or not. It was about Loki, not about you and me."
Steve moved closer, taking hold of Tony's wrists, and gently pulling his hands down. "That's not what I want to talk about." He hesitated, then decided to be blunt. Subtle hints rarely succeeded in getting Tony to talk about whatever was bothering him. "Are you... all right? You looked-"
"I'm fine," Tony interrupted, tugging his hands free.
Steve let go, backing off a step, and watched as Tony visibly struggled for words.
"I just..." he started, then stopped, shaking his head. "I don't like fighting with you. With Thor. Not about important things."
He might not like it, but that had never stopped him from doing it – Tony had always been willing to stick to his planned course of action with maddening stubbornness if he thought it was necessary, even when said course of action was self-destructive and morally questionable. If he truly believed that an alliance with Loki was the only way to save the world, he would walk into the cathedral and pick up the spear himself to bring it out to her. Or he would have at least kept arguing a lot longer. The near-fight in the kitchen was probably as much about Tony's ingrained habit of playing devil's advocate as anything else.
Steve had missed that, he realized. Tony had only given in when his suggestion had been officially voted down by half the team. He hadn't just conceded and agreed to go along with whatever Steve wanted. He'd visibly flinched at Thor's anger, and the accusation that his poor decisions had cost lives, but he'd looked the rest of them straight in the eyes and argued his point, without apologies.
Granted, an apology or two more to Thor might go a long way towards smoothing things over, but...
All things considered, he preferred arrogantly-sure-he-was-right, it's-all-my-responsibility-let-me-decide-FOR-you Tony to apologetic, broken Tony. It was just wrong to see Tony unsure of himself.
He didn't say that, though, not quite.
"I know," Steve told Tony. "I'm glad you did, though. You haven't told me that I'm a naïve, unrealistic boy scout in months."
Tony blinked, expression uncertain for second, then smiled. It was only a little forced. "That's because you usually aren't one. I only have to remind you that there are options you're not considering once in a while."
"When I won't consider an option, there's usually a reason for that," Steve said dryly.
"Blind stubbornness?" Tony suggested, raising his eyebrows.
"Morals," Steve said firmly. "Ethics. The Geneva Convention. Or the fact that a lot of your plans involve disturbingly high chances of you blowing up."
"That lightning the other week would not have blown me up." The elevator doors began to close, and without looking, Tony thrust a hand between them, keeping them open. "The armor's designed to handle power overloads without exploding."
"Electrocuted, then," Steve said. He stepped forward and wrapped his hand around the edge of the elevator door. "Here, I'll come down to the lab with you. Maybe I can help." Tony was unlikely to need his assistance with anything technological, but Steve wasn't going to let him hide in the basement by himself for the rest of the day. He would end up spending hours down there, not bothering to come upstairs to eat, and Steve wouldn't see him again until tomorrow night; the Avengers' labs always had a cot or sofa shoved into a corner somewhere, testament to both Tony and Hank's screwed-up working and sleeping patterns.
Tony shook his head. "I don't need any help," he said, the teasing note gone from his voice now. "Look, I have things to do. I'll be back upstairs for dinner, all right?"
Tony was still angry, obviously, even if he was making an effort to hide it. He'd never objected to Steve's presence in his lab before. "Well, I don't have things to do, so I might as well come. I can hand you tools."
"You can watch," Tony corrected. He grinned, then, as Steve followed him into the elevator. "You're just hoping I'll let you test Rhodey's shoulder cannon, aren't you?"
Steve seized on it as the olive branch it was. "You mean, hoping I'll get to fire a gun the size of Spiderman? Actually, no. I just wanted to watch you get covered in sweat and engine grease." On the other hand... "But now that you mention it..."
Tony shook his head. That momentary grin was gone, but so was the tension that had been holding his shoulders rigid. "I'm at the disassembly stage now. There won't be any playing with guns for a while. Plus, it's part of Rhodey's armor. It would be like letting someone else play with your shield."
The doors started to slide closed. Moments before they shut completely, the cat came dashing through them, a low streak of orange fur.
He rubbed his head and side blissfully against Tony's ankles as the elevator started to descend, looking up at Steve with a smug expression in his huge blue eyes. 'Mine,' that expression said. 'I only tolerate you.'
The cat was going to come with them to the Mansion eventually, Steve suspected. He'd only ever been Jarvis's pet in name – he slept on Steve and Tony's bed, played with Clint, and begged for food from the entire team. It had taken him about two days to figure out that Thor was a particularly soft touch.
Thor. Steve's newly regained good mood deflated a little. "You need to talk to Thor," he said quietly, the words sounding stiff and awkward to his own ears. Usually, balancing his relationship with Tony with their responsibilities as Avengers was, if not easy, then at least not especially hard. They'd reformed the team together, fought to end the SHRA together, and Steve had quietly decided that he wasn't going to let anything, be it supervillains, government interference, possession or experimental drugs, or either of their own nightmares get in the way of that again.
And he wasn't, but that didn't make trying to play peacemaker between his... lover? boyfriend? All the words he knew for it sounded silly – and one of his oldest friends any easier.
Tony's body language stiffened up again as soon as he said Thor's name. "I already did," he said, ignoring the hoarse, creaky purr that now emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles. "Apologizing again won't change what we did." He sounded resigned, tired.
Well, no, apologizing didn't undo the past, but, "Try it anyway," Steve suggested. "The way Thor sees it, an innocent man died at... not exactly his hands, but close enough that he feels dishonored by it. You know what that feels like. I've seen your face when reporters throw those questions about landmines and unexploded munitions at you."
"That's different," Tony said. "That actually is my responsibility. Just like the clone was. Thor did nothing; he just got caught in the fallout from another weapon I lost control of, one I shouldn't have allowed myself to be forced into making in the first place. And he's got just as much right to be angry at me as any of the people those landmines and missiles have hurt." He studied the smooth, polished brass of the elevator doors intently, as if searching for something in his own distorted reflection. Or avoiding Steve's eyes. "What use would another apology be when he doesn't trust my word anymore?"
So he was letting it drop, Steve guessed, waiting for Thor to slowly come around when he saw Tony being a good teammate, trying to work with him, and generally not being a mad scientist. Try hard enough, be smart enough, plan well enough, do things right, and success was inevitable – it was virtually Tony's motto, along with the assumption that if he wasn't successful, it was his fault for not foreseeing whatever had gone wrong and preventing it.
Sometimes it even worked. Maybe this would be one of those times – maybe Thor would eventually come around as Tony proved to him that his apology hadn't just been empty words.
If so, Steve hoped it happened before Chthon showed up on their doorstep.
The Avengers Mansion's white façade was entirely complete now, the late afternoon sunlight turning the pale stonework reddish-gold. From the air, the remains of the damage to the grounds were all too visible, but were it not for the crater still waiting to be filled in in the lawn and the half-dead remains of the gardens, the building itself would have looked untouched, as if it had stood there on the corner of Fifth and 70th unmolested since before the first world war.
This was actually the second time it had been rebuilt – the architects and construction company had done a very good job. How much, Carol wondered, had Tony had to bribe the Landmarks Preservation Commission in order to build an exact copy of the original building instead of some modern 'update' of it?
However much he'd spent, it had been worth it; getting the outside of the building completed in three months was nearly miraculous in New York, where scaffolding often clung to the outsides of buildings for years.
After nearly four straight hours in the air, it was a welcome sight.
Carol landed on the lawn, avoiding the crater, and turned to wave at the security camera she knew was there. If the old defense system had been back online, she would have been dodging lasers all the way to the ground, but as it was, nothing greeted her but stillness and silence. The construction crew still working on the interiors had obviously gone home for the day.
If her urgent return to the East Coast hadn't been prompted by an apparent lapse of sanity on Tony's part, she might almost have been grateful for the excuse to leave LA. The trip... hadn't gone well, though it hadn't been as bad as she had feared. She'd expected shouting and bitter fighting and that she'd leave miserable. She'd gotten the shouting in spades, but if anything she felt... slightly better for it, actually. Not better enough to want to stick around and keep doing it, but better.
Arguing with Jessica was a lot more cathartic without the worry that this would be the time Carol finally went too far and lost her for good. With less to lose, there was less to fight about.
Maybe Jessica had been right to want to call a halt to things before it stopped being fun. They had worked just fine as friends who occasionally hooked up before the SHRA had passed. And friends who were willing to forgive you some of the things Carol had pulled when she'd been drinking, and put up with the dysfunctional mess she'd been after she'd come out of the coma were harder to come by than gorgeous women with sex pheromone powers who were great in bed.
Really. She just had to keep telling herself that.
Simon had made his sappily sweet fling with Henry Hellrung official shortly before Carol's first trip back East, the one that had ended in poison gas attacks and mass hysteria. Apparently, she and Jessica couldn't compete with the seductive power inherent in Hellrung's encyclopedic command of classic cinema, and Simon had amicably ended their relationship in favor of living in domestic bliss with the Disney Channel version of Tony Stark.
Carol had started spending a lot of time in New York, then. She and Jessica argued more without Simon and his dislike of emotional conflict there to smooth things over, and make-up sex might be deeply satisfying, but it only went so far toward patching things up again after they'd both said things they regretted.
Jessica and Simon had been the first of Carol's lovers in a long time whom she could allow herself to get a little rough with, whom she didn't have to worry about accidentally hurting, but there were more ways to hurt someone than simply leaving too many bruises during over-enthusiastic sex.
They'd argued again this time, despite the lower stakes, over Wanda's return and Simon's refusal to come back to New York and see her. Hellrung was all for facing down your problems with a positive attitude, or at least with long-suffering endurance. Jessica, for once, had been in total agreement with him – she'd kept enough secrets in the rest of her life to prefer brutal honesty in relationships, she'd said.
Brutal honesty, Carol had learned, was a lot easier to dish out than it was to listen to.
Someone had needed to stick up for Simon. Jessica hadn't been there when Vision had died, when Wanda had tried to destroy them all. She didn't really understand how personal the betrayal had to be for Simon, who'd lost his entire remaining family in a single day. She thought he ought to be happy to have Wanda back, didn't see Wanda's madness as any different than what the Shadow King had done to her.
"She didn't choose it, Carol, anymore than you chose what Rogue did to you. Anymore than I chose to be his pawn and his plaything."
Vision, Scott, and Clint hadn't chosen to die, either, and Clint hadn't chosen to have sex with Wanda. Jessica, of all people, should have understood that. She knew what mind-control was like, what it was like to have your choices taken away from you. Wanda was not the person one ought to be feeling sorry for here.
No one answered when Carol rang the doorbell, but knowing Tony, he was just as likely to be walled up in some soundproof workshop, completely oblivious to anything that wasn't either mechanical or electronic.
She could come back later. It would give her a chance to shower, change clothes, relax for a while after hours of flying. She could sit around with Jan and rant about exes who thought they knew what was best for you and were distractingly sexy when they were angry. Jan had dated Tony once, so she ought to have experience in that department.
Or she could just let herself in. She hadn't flown at top speed all the way from LA to wait around for Tony to make room in his schedule for her. He had to have some rational justification for why he thought it was a good idea to accept help from supervillains after they'd just finished fixing the mess from the last time they'd done so, and she couldn't wait to hear it.
Complying with the SHRA had been necessary, both as the only viable way to exercise some degree of damage control, and because refusing to obey legitimate government legislation would have only made the public perception of superhumans worse – as the anti-Registration side's resistance, in fact, had.
Loki was not a representative of the US government, or anyone else they had any reason to respect, and had in point of fact tried to kill them all more than once. Trusting Wanda and letting her back onto the team – probationary Carol's ass, she was pretty much on the team again – was bad enough without accepting help from the overtly, self-admittedly evil.
She'd said as much to Clint, on the phone, but she doubted he'd relayed more than the barest gist of her words to the others. Probably just, "Ms. Marvel votes no, and she thinks you're crazy."
Carol pressed her thumb against the tiny biometric lock tucked discreetly into the corner of the door frame, and waited while it analyzed her fingerprint and possibly her DNA. After a moment, the door unlocked with an audible click, and for the first time in over a year, she was inside the Avengers Mansion.
There was no furniture in the front hall, but the staircase and the marble floor were the same. Untouched, this time, with no sign of the crack in the floor where Thor had once dropped his hammer, the uneven spots in the plasterwork where scratches and gouges had been filled in and painted over innumerable times. The smell of fresh paint and dry plaster dust was everywhere.
Her boots were loud against the bare marble floor, and louder still on the living room's wooden floorboards.
There was no one in there, either, but a fire had been laid in the fireplace, and either Steve or Tony had left a book lying on the coffee table, face down to keep their place in it.
The Maltese Falcon. It had been one of Vision's favorite books, she remembered, with a pang. He'd loved film noir and pulp detective novels, anything with trench coats and fedoras and hardboiled private eyes.
Carol frowned. Steve preferred the movie version of Sam Spade to the more ruthless and less soulful-eyed original, and Tony preferred his manly pulp novels to be of the James Bond variety.
There was a soft sound behind her, someone's shoes scuffing against the floor.
Carol turned sharply, feeling a flash of guilty embarrassment at being caught snooping through Steve or Tony's reading material.
"Wanda!" She felt her face heat, and hated it. Damn it, Wanda was staying here, too. How could she have forgotten?
"Carol," Wanda said, moving into the room. At least she looked uneasy, too. She was in civilian clothing, in dark colors, and her gloves were missing. The spiky black tattoos on the backs of her hands stood out in sharp relief, like a Shi-ar's facial markings.
She must have realized that Carol was staring, because after a moment, she pulled her hands back, letting the folds of her skirt hide them.
"They're not here," Wanda said, stiffly. "Cap and Tony are both out."
"Maybe you can explain what on earth Tony was thinking, then." It wasn't what she had intended to say – talking to Wanda at all was something she would prefer to avoid – but irritation overrode her better instincts, as it did too often. She had spent a good portion of her flight planning out exactly what she was going to say to Tony, one version for if she was able to get him alone, and another in case Steve was present; she hadn't wanted to call him on the carpet for poor decision-making in front of their team leader, boyfriend or no. Not unless it was necessary.
Wanda looked up, then, meeting her eyes levelly. "He was thinking the same thing I was," she said. "That Chthon may be too powerful for us to defeat on our own, should he break free, and that Loki is significantly less likely to try to destroy reality itself than Chthon is."
"That's the last thing I expected to hear from you," Carol told her. "If Strange is right, I'd think you would have had enough of evil chaos deities."
Wanda crossed her arms, the fabric of her blouse wrinkling, and said stiffly, "There's evil, and there's Chthon."
"Yes," Carol said. "And once upon a time, you wouldn't have sided with evil."
"I was a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants long before I was an Avenger."
Which was technically true, but, "That's not the same thing, and you know it."
"No." Wanda's voice was flat. "Siding with Magneto was my choice, even if it was a bad one."
And being possessed by Chthon hadn't been. However, exactly how much control Wanda had had over her actions while possessed was unclear – how much of what she'd done had been Chthon's influence, and how much had been her own subconscious desires? Or conscious ones?
'No more mutants.'
Who wished an entire group of people into extinction? How could you ever trust someone whose mind had harbored such a wish?
Carol folded her own arms, realized she was mirroring Wanda's body language, and unfolded them. "Lots of us have had our choices taken away," she said. "Most of us didn't kill people over it, or try to destroy the world." At the words, all of the anger she had felt at the time came back. The paperback she'd guiltily set back down on the coffee table stood out with painful clarity, the garish cover shouting the title in bright, block letters. Vision had died, if not precisely by Wanda's hands, then through her magic, and now she was sitting right there in the very building she'd destroyed, reading his favorite book. There was something obscene about it, and Carol felt a sudden urge to snatch the book away and take it back to LA with her, to give it to Simon, who had far more right to Vision's memory than the person responsible for his death.
She narrowed her eyes at Wanda. "Tony feels guilty about what happened to you. He's clearly overcompensating. Thor wasn't here to see what you did. Steve forgives everyone, eventually." Even Tony, who had fought with him so bitterly. Even Sharon Carter, who had shot him – not intentionally, true, but a lot of men wouldn't have seen past the fact of the bullet. "But I don't understand Clint forgiving you. Not after what you did to him. I don't see how he can stand to be in the same room as you." That, even more then the rest of this, made no sense. In her experience, men were more likely to shrug off being taken sexual advantage of than women were; she'd known at least a half a dozen guys in the Air Force who'd had sex they didn't remember while drunk, and the greatest source of trauma – that they'd admitted to, anyway – seemed to be the women involved's lack of perceived attractiveness. But Clint had been visibly upset, when he'd told her about it, afraid he'd taken advantage of Wanda, blaming himself for not resisting, for not bringing her back with him. And yet he hadn't said a word against allowing her to come back.
"That's between me and Clint." Wanda's voice rose sharply as she spoke, the words sounding strained, defensive, as if she truly felt guilty. Good. She ought to. "I brought him back as soon as I could. He's one of my oldest friends—do you think I wouldn't do anything to be able to do the same with Vision?"
Carol looked away from Wanda's tight, set face, and the suspicious shine in her eyes, to the living room's bare floors, their finish still glossy and untouched. "Yeah, you cared about them so much that you tried to kill them to, what, punish us for the fact that you lost your children? Was that how Chthon got you to do it?" Wanda flinched, her shoulders hunching up defensively, but Carol pressed on, almost glad to be hurting the other woman. "You got inside our heads! You used our worst weaknesses against us. Chthon couldn't have known those things." Making Jen lose control of her powers, shoving Tony off the wagon; those were personal attacks, the kind of thing someone did when they wanted to hurt someone they knew well as badly as possible. It would have made no sense for Chthon to have attacked the Avengers that way – they were nothing but pawns to him. Using Wanda's powers to slaughter them all without the cat-toying-with-a-mouse build up would have been more efficient.
And yet no one else seemed to see that. Even Simon didn't want to believe it, though in his case, she could understand why. Better to believe that Vision's death had been due entirely to some external force than to any part of the woman he and Vision had both loved. At least that way he could keep his memories of both of them untainted – which was, she suspected, part of the reason he was so reluctant to see Wanda now.
Wanda's hands were balled into fists now, her back stiff and her eyes glittering. She stared at Carol with her chin up, jaw set as if she were bracing herself for a blow. Carol wasn't going to give her the satisfaction – if nothing else, she would probably break Wanda's jaw if she let herself hit her, and it would probably get her kicked off the team again. And even if it didn't, beating an unarmed woman who didn't have superstrength would be the actions of a bully, and Carol wasn't going to sink that low.
"I didn't do it on purpose!" Wanda's voice was rough, almost shrill. "Clint knows that. Tony and Cap know that. I've tried to tell Simon, but he won't talk to me – your girlfriend hung up on me when I called."
Good for Jessica. That must have been before she'd decided that Simon needed to hear what Wanda had to say.
The core of the Avengers, the ones who'd been on the team the longest – Steve, Tony, Hank, Jan, Thor, Clint, Wanda – always got extra leeway with one another. It wasn't surprising, given how long they'd known each other, but it wasn't always a good thing, either. If Carol had pulled half the things Hank had... Or Tony, who seemed to go out of his way to fuck himself over. And yet they'd both been forgiven, just as Wanda had. On the other hand, neither of them had killed a teammate, though Hank had apparently come close.
Carol had never been able to stay on a team long enough to earn that – first there was Marcus, then she'd lost her Binary powers and had to leave the Starjammers, and then she'd fucked up her shot at the Avengers again with the drinking, and then she left the Avengers to work for the government once she'd earned her slot back. And she'd enjoyed the work, before the SHRA started, but... On the other hand, if she'd been given that kind of easy forgiveness, she might still be drinking. Or maybe they'd all have put up more of a fight to stop her from going off with Marcus.
Thank god Wanda and Chthon hadn't used those particular memories against her. They could have, so easily. If the whole thing had gone on a little longer, another of Marcus's dopplegangers might even have shown up, drawn there by deliberately created bad luck and altered chance.
She stabbed a finger at Wanda, and had the satisfaction of seeing her flinch back. "How can we ever trust you again? I get hauled off to another dimension by a rapist and no one lifts a finger, but they welcome you back with open arms? You should be locked up somewhere where you can't hurt anybody else," she spat, "not back on the team."
Wanda's eyes narrowed. "I was locked up!" she shouted. "On Mount Wundagore, for months. I'm still locked up now." She brandished her tattooed hands, all but waving them in Carol's face. "What do you think these are? Locks, on my power, to keep me from drawing enough to let Chthon take me again. To keep me safe."
"Safe," Carol repeated. "You mean, like Strange was safe?" Even at her worst, even when she'd been drinking, her problems had never caused anyone else to be hurt. She had come close once or twice, avoiding it only by luck – Tony could have been injured badly, that time she'd thrown him through the wing of a plane, or the airliner itself could have crashed – but nothing like the trail of collateral damage Wanda's possession by Chthon was leaving, even now.
Wanda shook her head sharply. "I didn't mean for that to happen! I thought if I went to Strange, I'd be safe, that he had enough power to defend himself if Chthon took me over again. I didn't want any of this. The last thing I remember is going to find Jen, and Cap says that was weeks before everything else happened. I was under Chthon's control for months, without anyone noticing, just like Tony and Immortus. Do you think I wanted that? That I wanted Agatha to die, or Scott, or Vi-vision." She stumbled over Vision's name, and looked away, eyes going to the coffee table. "I wanted someone to stop me," she said, more quietly. "I asked Xavier to, and he wouldn't." For a moment, she sounded almost bitter, but then her shoulders slumped slightly, and her voice just sounded tired as she added, "We never seem to notice when one of us needs help."
No, Carol thought. And when we do notice, and we usually manage to make things worse. The way Tony had when he'd gotten her kicked off the team over the drinking problem she'd barely even had yet. Or we try when it's too late.
"You're right," she said. "We didn't notice that anything was wrong until it was too late. This time we already know you're compromised. This time, if anything happens, it will be our fault for letting our guard down."
"Fine!" Wanda's hands made an angry slashing motion. "Do that. I want you to do that! The others all treat me like I'm either a victim or a timebomb, but none of them would do anything about it if I needed to be taken out. None of them could."
Carol raised her eyebrows. "Don't underestimate Tony. Or Hank. It would destroy them, but they'd do it."
"That," Wanda snapped. "That's why we considered an alliance with Loki. Because sometimes things you know could destroy you are worth it. Sometimes you need to do what's necessary even if it might hurt you."
'Like wipe your species off the face of the earth?' "I know. I've done that. It ended up with Steve dead and Tony suicidal and half of us hating the other half." Carol narrowed her eyes and pointed at Wanda. "Tell Tony I want to talk to him," she added, grimly.
"Fine. I will." Wanda stepped aside, pointedly moving out of the path to the door. "Don't break the door on your way out."
Carol didn't – in fact, she made an effort to shut the front door as gently as possible, before flying away to find something acceptable to hit.
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
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Loved the update on JessicaD and Carol and Simon. And whoa? Simon and Henry? Didn't see that coming at all! :O And Carol. your issues are really really showing... A little calming down and distane might be just what the doctor ordered here... Someone needs to be there, stat.
Anyway, this is *awesome*! Can't wait for more! :D
Also! First! \o/
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I love all the drama going on, especially the relational ones.
All the tensions and angst and mourning and so on so on... So Delicious I want to lick my monitor.
I so want to know what's going to happen...
Sorry for already demanding the next installment, but I can't help it. *dies*
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I love love love this line especially:
No, Carol thought. And when we do notice, and we usually manage to make things worse. The way Tony had when he'd gotten her kicked off the team over the drinking problem she'd barely even had yet. Or we try when it's too late.
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Reassembled
I ship Clint/Wanda. Will that come true?
Please post another chapter soon.
Sincerely