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bungakertas) wrote2014-02-03 07:57 am
bungakertas) wrote2014-02-03 07:57 am
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Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 6
Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 6
Disclaimer and general author's notes are in the first chapter, which is linked at the bottom.
Author's Notes: This chapter took longer to get out than the others. I just wasn't liking the way it looked in the edits. So I went through and fleshed out some parts. This is the longest chapter in the story, but it works much better now.
*~*~*
Everything was perfect.
Darcy was graduating in December and threating to quit working for Jane (although she called it “babysitting the lady genius”) unless SHIELD came up with a salary for her, and Pepper was making headlines in Forbes, and Tony was making headlines in Scientific American, and Phil very much felt like he had nothing to do until the Fantastic Four got into something with Spider-Man (and there was a team-up he never thought he’d see) that involved Doctor Octopus and a new player in the New-York-City-superpowered-villain set calling himself Mysterio. Clean-up on this one was going to be ridiculous. Phil was actually looking forward to it.
Tony moved them all to Malibu, primarily. He also set aside spaces for all of them in every house that he owned. And Phil had always known that he was rich, but it was somewhat odd to see Tony’s designer clothes infiltrating his closets and remember how out of place he’d felt standing beside Tony the night that they’d met. He had his own designer clothes now. And none of his suits had been truly “cheap” for a while. It was an odd feeling, never having to budget for anything.
Tony had taken over the Research and Development arm of Stark Industries and was cheerfully revolutionizing household technologies. One of his more interesting ideas was what he called a “mini-AI” to run the StarkPhone. In some ways, it functioned like Apple’s Siri, responding to requests and interacting with apps. But unlike Siri, the StarkPhone had a true AI who would adapt to, learn from, and even get to know its user. And to prevent people from worrying about data collection, the AI was individual to each phone, so there was no need for it to transmit any data to Stark Industries. The phones even chose their own names and voices after use over time. They were still in the testing phase, but Tony had installed the first prototypes on their phones.
Phil’s phone had named itself TED and would not explain why beyond informing him that it was an acronym. Tony and Darcy could not stop laughing when they learned this.
Everything was perfect.
Everything stayed perfect until October of the next year. Because in October, the fourth best thing ever actually happened.
Captain America was discovered in the Arctic. Alive.
Phil called in every favor anyone had ever owed him to get put on the retrieval team. He found out later that Fury had planned on choosing him, but decided that watching his maneuvering was more entertaining. But it was worth it because Steve Rogers—the Steve Rogers—was actually alive and he was on the recovery team. Bringing him back to SHIELD’s New York office made him feel just like a rockstar. Captain America was alive and he had just been stuck since World War II.
…And that was probably going to be a problem, now that he thought on it.
Fury did not put him on the planning team for when Rogers woke up. This turned out to be a mistake because Phil could have told them not to put a pre-Pearl Harbor baseball game on the radio. Of course, nearly anyone could have told them that. What were they thinking?
Phil was incredibly disappointed (“Crushed” was the word Tony, Pepper, and Darcy all supplied simultaneously) when Rogers chose to retreat from basically the entire world after waking up. The back pay owed him by the Army was considerable, so after investing it he didn’t even need to find a job. He pretty much didn’t do anything but buy groceries and refuse any contact from SHIELD. Still, Fury held out hope that he could be brought around—eventually—and Phil began restructuring all his plans for the Avengers Initiative (a project that was only mothballed on paper). He couldn’t wait to put this team together and see what they would do.
And time went on. The building Tony had been sketching in holograms was turning into an actual building in New York. And by spring of the next year, he, Tony and Pepper were mostly living there. Darcy had finally wheedled a salary out of SHIELD (she had apparently convinced Jane to threaten to quit and take all of Thor’s good will with her if Darcy didn’t get paid) and so she worked in New Mexico during the week. Phil, much to his surprise, soon found himself reassigned to Erik Selvig’s project in New Mexico, and he couldn’t get away on weekends. Darcy visited his apartment as often as she could.
Selvig was working on using the Tesseract to create a power source. Which struck Phil as very strange since Howard Stark already did that six decades ago. The arc reactor had worked. And now Tony had made the arc reactor much more cost-effective, and smaller, and sometimes portable. And his new building in New York was about to be powered by one. SHIELD could buy arc reactor technology if they wanted. And while Tony didn’t make weapons anymore, Stark Industries still contracted with military and law-enforcement agencies to make other things, and power sources could definitely be on that list. Not to mention the tiny issue of it being illegal for government agencies to function as businesses, so he had no idea how they could market this project. Though Fury clearly planned to at some point.
The worst part about all this was that Phil couldn’t tell Tony. Not that Tony was in any kind of commercial danger from SHIELD’s attempts to create a functional power source using the Tesseract. SHIELD was decades behind Stark, and Selvig, for all his strengths, just wasn’t as smart as Tony. Even if he could figure out how to use it, by the time they could make it affordable, Stark would have shored up the market. But Fury knew that. There was something else going on here. Something that, Phil noted, he was not being kept in the loop on.
Day followed day, in an incredibly boring progression until Phil began to wish for just a tiny bit of trouble to liven things up. Just a little.
And he got his wish.
There was no preamble. No run-up. Nothing happened to indicate that things were about to change. It was simply that one day, Selvig noted a power spike in the Tesseract that just did not quit. And nothing they did could make it stop.
Phil ordered the whole campus evacuated. Much to his surprise, this malfunction apparently merited the personal presence of Director Fury and his ever-present adjutant Maria Hill.
Yes, there was definitely something he wasn’t being told.
Despite getting the campus evacuated much faster than they ever managed in a drill, it wasn’t fast enough. He wasn’t able to find out how many agents they lost that day. Fury ordered him to start assembling the Avengers immediately. But to do it without Barton, since Barton had been compromised by the alien from Asgard who had arrived through the Tesseract. (This day was easily stranger than the day he’d been attacked by the Destroyer.)
Phil did something that night that he had never done before. He disobeyed orders. Rather than calling Romanoff right away, he called Darcy and told her to get Jane out of the country. Ironically, considering the alien invader was an Asgardian, he had them sent to Scandinavia, but Darcy was too close to ground zero. He had no way of knowing where their invader, who he had been told had been identified as Thor’s very hostile little brother Loki, would go next. Since SHIELD had minimal involvement in Norway, and since Loki seemed to be interested in SHIELD, that was as safe a place as he could think of. Pepper was with Tony, so she was safe enough for now.
Then he called Romanoff and sent her for Banner. And since Barton was out, that meant someone had to fill his place. Which meant that he was, somehow, going to have to get Tony back into the Avengers Initiative. And since Tony had turned down all the prior requests, that meant that he was going to have to trick him into it.
The worst part of the whole thing, however, was that it wasn’t even going to be hard.
Phil arrived in the penthouse of Stark Tower to find Tony and Pepper comfortably on their way to a very good evening.
“Phil!” Pepper said excitedly. She leapt up from where she was sitting beside Tony, and rushed over to give him a hug.
Tony gave him a dirty look. “Phil. I thought you were stuck in the Land Of Enchantment.” Dirty looks not withstanding, Phil still rated a quick kiss hello.
“I was. Unfortunately, something has happened,” Phil said. And before he realized it, he was telling them everything. The power spike in the Tesseract, Loki’s attack, Barton’s compromise, and the collapse of the facility.
“We still don’t know how many agents we lost,” he concluded.
“I can be in the suit in—”
“I’m not here for that,” Phil said, cutting Tony off.
Tony gave him an odd look. “Then what are you here for, Agent?” Because, married or not, he still didn’t actually use Phil’s name a good fifty percent of the time.
And this was it. This was the moment when Phil tricked him into the Avengers. “We need a consult,” Phil told him, handing Tony a set of files.
Tony scowled, but took the files and had them on the towers internal holoprojectors in seconds. Steve Rogers’ face, Bruce Banner’s face, the Tesseract, Thor. All of it was laid out together. The blue glow of the holographic Tesseract was echoed in the blue glow of the arc reactor powering Tony’s heart, like a thread of energy woven through their histories.
Tony was enthralled. And just like that, Phil knew he had succeeded in his trick. Because now that Tony had a puzzle to solve, it would drive him nuts until he did so. He was back in the Avengers. He just didn’t know it yet.
As betrayals went, this one wasn’t that bad. And it was to save the world. And he had mitigated it—he hoped—by making sure to give Tony every last scrap of Selvig’s notes. Phil just hoped Tony would forgive him.
Pepper sighed. “So much for that.”
“Just give me a couple hours,” Tony said, turning to her.
She shook her head. “You have homework. You have a lot of homework.”
Phil and Pepper left.
They had just arrived at the airport when his phone started going off. Captain America had agreed to come in and someone needed to escort him to the helicarrier. He tried not to bounce on his toes.
Pepper caught the look on his face. “Well, I suppose it can’t be all bad news.”
“I’m going to meet Captain America. Actually meet him this time,” Phil told him.
Pepper gave him an easy laugh and a hug. “Try not to be too much of a stalker.”
Phil made no promises as he saw her onto her jet to DC.
Captain America turned out to be both bigger and smaller than he had imagined him. In person, awake, he was huge. “All-American offensive linebacker” did not cover it. In terms of sheer size, only Thor was more physically imposing.
But as for presence? Steve Rogers was quiet, liked to draw, and didn’t speak much. And possibly after marrying Tony Stark, Darcy Lewis, and Pepper Potts, all of whom were larger than life in their own ways, Phil was just very hard to overwhelm anymore. But eventually Rogers looked up from the files in the tablet he held. “So this…Doctor Banner was trying to replicate the serum they used on me?”
He sounded guilty. Hoping to divert him, Phil said, “A lot of people were. You were the world’s first superhero. Banner thought gamma radiation might hold the key to unlocking Erskine’s original formula.”
“Didn’t really go his way, did it?” Rogers said, with a heavy sigh.
“Not so much,” Phil agreed. “When he’s not that thing, though, the guy’s like a…Steven Hawking.”
Rogers gave him a confused look. Right. Temporal culture shock. “He’s like a…” and here he paused. While the scientific genius that sprang to mind for World War II was Warner Von Braun, that name had connotations that Rogers, in particular, might not be fond of. “…Albert Einstein?” he tried.
Rogers nodded in understanding.
“I’ve got to say, it’s an honor to meet you,” Phil continued. “Officially. I mean, I sort of met you.” Rogers had a pleasant, but mildly disinterested expression on his face. “I…watched you…while you were sleeping.” Dork!
Rogers face fell.
“I mean,” Phil said, trying again, “I was one of the team that retrieved you from the Arctic.”
That got a self-deprecating, but understanding, expression as Rogers stood and moved to the front of the jet.
“And…it’s really just a huge honor to have you on board,” Phil finished, hoping that did not sound as lame out loud to anyone else as it did to him.
“Well, I hope I’m the man for the job,” Rogers said quietly.
“Oh, you are,” Phil answered. “By the way, we’ve made some modifications to your uniform.”
“Uniform?” Rogers asked. “Aren’t the stars and stripes a little…old fashioned?”
Phil frowned. Certainly there were groups of people who frowned on patriotism in general, but that was hardly a common sentiment. So unless someone had been supplying Rogers with nothing but MSNBC and ThinkProgress, his comment was a very odd one. Especially considering Rogers was a soldier speaking to a government agent. He certainly hadn’t joined SHIELD for any lack of love for the flag. He had a feeling Rogers’ reasons for enlisting were similar.
Out loud, he said, “No.” After a pause he added, “And even if they were, with everything that’s happening? The things that are about to come to light? People might need a little old fashioned.”
When they landed on the deck of the helicarrier, Romanoff had a quick lie about him being needed on the bridge. But Phil did not care, because that meant he could go call Darcy.
Darcy, it turned out, was unhappy. “Do you know how cold it is in Norway?” she said. “And without you or Pepper here to keep me warm, either? Are you sure Jane needs to be here?”
“The alien who came through the Tesseract called himself Loki. He’s Thor’s brother and he’s hostile. He’s already attacked Selvig. There’s every reason to believe he would do the same thing to you or Foster, since you are also Thor’s friends,” Phil replied.
“I hate it when you go all secret-agent-calm like that,” Darcy sighed. “You’re nearly always right when you do it.”
“Darcy,” Phil said, “if the time comes, remember what I taught you. Foster hasn’t had any training at all. You may be the only one who can keep her safe.”
“No pressure, then,” she said.
“You’re whip smart, you tased Thor, and you made SHIELD give you money. I have faith in you,” he answered.
There was a pause on the other end of the line and then Darcy said, “When I see you next, I am going to kiss you breathless.”
“I look forward to it,” Phil answered. They hung up
Loki was a very unsubtle alien invader, since he shortly appeared in Stuttgart, Germany, destroying people’s eyeballs. While most of Phil reacted with the anger that was expected at something like that, there was a part of him that was distantly impressed at the originality. Rogers was able to bring him in, but to everyone’s surprise, he brought Tony and—unbelievably—Thor along with him.
The Thor. Again.
And apparently Tony managed to get under both his and Rogers’ skin before even twenty minutes had passed.
Phil met him on the helicarrier as he was taking the suit off. “You picked a fight with Thor. On purpose. Pepper isn’t going to be pleased.”
“She’s going to be less pleased about you not telling us SHIELD is trying to get me to sue the US government for patent infringement,” Tony replied. “Power sources from the Tesseract is so last century. Stark is working on building cars powered by one of those. Honestly, what are they doing with this?”
“I have not been read into the Tesseract project,” Phil told him, in his driest of dry tones. Because the helicarrier was to SHIELD what the Hoover Building was to the FBI. This was not the place for Phil to be telling Tony how he was counting on him to do exactly what he was doing.
Instead, Tony narrowed his eyes at him for a moment, though the effect was somewhat ruined by his struggle with one of his suit gauntlets that had been dented in his fight with Thor. “Why would they not tell you?”
“Need to know only. SHIELD believes that I don’t.”
That had Tony’s expression going furious, because it had been a long time since Phil had acted anything like this impassive towards him. “So you aren’t gonna tell me anything, either. That’s fine. I’m going to find out anyway.” He angrily stripped the boots from his feet. “Where is Darcy? Is she safe?”
Phil was a little irritated that Tony didn’t think they were on the same team, but given everything that had happened, it was understandable that he was distracted. They’d sort it out at home later, after they’d saved the world. Probably with a lot of yelling. “She’s in Norway with Jane Foster. They’re as safe as they can be right now.”
“Good. When this is over, you have a lot of explaining to do.”
“I look forward to it.”
The two of them headed for the bridge.
Watching Tony bounce around the bridge like an excited five-year-old was half-amusing, half-embarrassing. Though there was a part of Phil that was waiting for him to be impressed. Because the helicarrier was impressive, dammit. Not the concept of it. Flying aircraft carriers were hardly a new idea. But SHIELD’s was fuel efficient, stealth capable, and could actually travel at a decent speed. Nobody but them had ever figured out those last three. And Tony was asking how Fury saw the screens on his left?
When Tony left the bridge without so much as a backward glance at him, Phil was about to move to an empty computer station and bring up video feed of the detention level. Romanoff was going to get first crack at interrogating Loki, and he had no intention of missing the show. But before he could go anywhere, he heard a booming voice from across the bridge. “Son of Coul!”
Phil turned to see Thor striding across the bridge towards him. Honestly, he was a bit surprised Thor even noticed him, considering he’d been standing off to the side.
He told him about sending Foster to Norway. “Handsome fee, private plane. Very remote. She’ll be safe.” He did not tell him that he had been more concerned about Foster’s research assistant. Somehow, “Also, I married your friend Darcy.” seemed a bit too abrupt. And before he could think of a less jarring way of bringing it up, Thor was off onto other topics. Topics that included miming large antlers, something that Phil made a mental note to get security footage to send to Darcy.
The situation deteriorated from there. He and Thor watched Romanoff from a computer station. Loki broke more easily than he had thought, but knowing what he planned for the helicarrier was not, in the long term, what they wanted to know. What Loki planned for the rest of the world was what they wanted, and Loki hadn’t said word one about that. Thor made some noises about wanting to talk to the woman who had out-talked his brother and left.
Phil sighed. Romanoff was not going to give Thor any answers about Loki. The only reason he didn’t already know there were no answers to be had was because he didn’t want to admit his brother was that far gone. And while Romanoff was good, even she couldn’t do a complete personality assessment over a ten-minute interview while she was busy not tipping her own hand the whole time. No, today was going to be a draw. The next move would be—
Something rocked the ship. Hard. An explosion?
He was moving even before Fury’s orders came in over his radio. “Lock down the detention section” was the only logical move from here. Whatever Loki was planning, Loki was bound to be at the center of it. But first, Phil had to make a stop.
The very exciting planning models created from the Destroyer in Puente Antigua had turned into incredibly exciting prototype weaponry. And several of the first generation testing weapons were on board. Phil took one from its place, trying to contain his excitement as he did. He had been itching to play with one of these guns ever since he’d seen them.
He hadn’t even reached the door when he heard a roar. The sound itself was so violent it seemed to rip through the bulkheads of the ship.
The Hulk was now on board. Loki’s plan had worked.
Phil headed for Loki’s prison cell. He arrived to find Thor in the cell and Loki about to drop him from the helicarrier. Loki’s minion was easy enough to dispatch, which allowed him to turn his gun onto Loki himself.
“Move away, please!” he announced.
Looking up from the control console on his former cell, Loki eyed the weapon curiously.
“You like this?” Phil asked. “We started working on the prototype after you sent the Destroyer. Even I don’t know what it does. Do you want to find out?”
And it was here that Phil realized he’d made a mistake. Or rather, here that his mistake was pointed out to him by a searing pain that ripped through his chest. The pain was so incredible that his whole vision whited-out for a moment. He could process no other sensation. But when he began to be aware of other things, he realized that Loki was behind him, but he could see part of that scepter of his protruding from the front of his chest. And that shouldn’t be.
When Loki pulled the scepter back, his knees couldn’t hold him up. Some helpful part of his brain finally kicked in enough to identify this experience as “being stabbed.” He could do nothing but watch as Loki dropped the cage—and Thor—from the the ship.
Loki picked up his scepter and began to walk away.
“You’re going to lose,” Phil said. He wasn’t even sure what made him speak, but he felt like it was something Darcy would do. He could feel the blood flowing out of his back, and there was a lot of it. He was never going to see her face again. He was never going to see any of his family again. So he could not want to spend his last moments doing anything but thinking of them. But acting in ways that reminded him of them.
Loki turned in confusion. “Am I?”
“It’s in your nature.”
Loki scowled. “Your heroes are scattered. Your floating fortress falls from the sky. Where is my disadvantage?”
“You lack conviction.”
And at that, Loki’s face turned to a mask of anger. “I don’t think I—”
But whatever he didn’t think, no one would know. Because Phil had finally gotten his gun around enough for a shot. And he took it. Loki went flying backwards in a blast of flame.
“So that’s what it does,” he said to himself. Pepper would have been proud. He kept calm.
Director Fury was the first person to reach him.
“Sorry, boss,” Phil said, trying not to cough. Every time his ribs moved, it was painful, and he hated to think what a cough would feel like. “The guy rabbited.”
“Just stay awake. Eyes on me,” Fury answered.
He was about to disobey a direct order from Fury for the second time, Phil thought. “No, I’m clocked out here.”
“Not an option.”
Phil shook his head. “Just tell Tony that I’m sorry we couldn’t…have that talk…he was…”
*~*~*
Author’s Notes: TED actually does stand for something, but I thought it’d be more fun if Phil’s phone kept a secret from him. (As it happens, I have mostly forgotten what it stands for too, so I suppose TED is keeping the secret from everyone now. Oh well. It happens like that sometimes.)
I actually talked the helicarrier idea over with military family members. And it’s probably possible now for the US to build something pretty much identical to the one from The Avengers. However, it would most likely be cost prohibitive, both to build and operate (it would crunch through a lot of fuel to keep that thing airborne, especially given how aerodynamic it’s not). And it probably wouldn’t be very strategic. And I don’t think the design in the movie could actually travel very fast IRL.
Chapter One - First Meetings
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Four - Darcy
Chapter Five - Balance
Chapter Seven - Tahiti
Disclaimer and general author's notes are in the first chapter, which is linked at the bottom.
Author's Notes: This chapter took longer to get out than the others. I just wasn't liking the way it looked in the edits. So I went through and fleshed out some parts. This is the longest chapter in the story, but it works much better now.
Everything was perfect.
Darcy was graduating in December and threating to quit working for Jane (although she called it “babysitting the lady genius”) unless SHIELD came up with a salary for her, and Pepper was making headlines in Forbes, and Tony was making headlines in Scientific American, and Phil very much felt like he had nothing to do until the Fantastic Four got into something with Spider-Man (and there was a team-up he never thought he’d see) that involved Doctor Octopus and a new player in the New-York-City-superpowered-villain set calling himself Mysterio. Clean-up on this one was going to be ridiculous. Phil was actually looking forward to it.
Tony moved them all to Malibu, primarily. He also set aside spaces for all of them in every house that he owned. And Phil had always known that he was rich, but it was somewhat odd to see Tony’s designer clothes infiltrating his closets and remember how out of place he’d felt standing beside Tony the night that they’d met. He had his own designer clothes now. And none of his suits had been truly “cheap” for a while. It was an odd feeling, never having to budget for anything.
Tony had taken over the Research and Development arm of Stark Industries and was cheerfully revolutionizing household technologies. One of his more interesting ideas was what he called a “mini-AI” to run the StarkPhone. In some ways, it functioned like Apple’s Siri, responding to requests and interacting with apps. But unlike Siri, the StarkPhone had a true AI who would adapt to, learn from, and even get to know its user. And to prevent people from worrying about data collection, the AI was individual to each phone, so there was no need for it to transmit any data to Stark Industries. The phones even chose their own names and voices after use over time. They were still in the testing phase, but Tony had installed the first prototypes on their phones.
Phil’s phone had named itself TED and would not explain why beyond informing him that it was an acronym. Tony and Darcy could not stop laughing when they learned this.
Everything was perfect.
Everything stayed perfect until October of the next year. Because in October, the fourth best thing ever actually happened.
Captain America was discovered in the Arctic. Alive.
Phil called in every favor anyone had ever owed him to get put on the retrieval team. He found out later that Fury had planned on choosing him, but decided that watching his maneuvering was more entertaining. But it was worth it because Steve Rogers—the Steve Rogers—was actually alive and he was on the recovery team. Bringing him back to SHIELD’s New York office made him feel just like a rockstar. Captain America was alive and he had just been stuck since World War II.
…And that was probably going to be a problem, now that he thought on it.
Fury did not put him on the planning team for when Rogers woke up. This turned out to be a mistake because Phil could have told them not to put a pre-Pearl Harbor baseball game on the radio. Of course, nearly anyone could have told them that. What were they thinking?
Phil was incredibly disappointed (“Crushed” was the word Tony, Pepper, and Darcy all supplied simultaneously) when Rogers chose to retreat from basically the entire world after waking up. The back pay owed him by the Army was considerable, so after investing it he didn’t even need to find a job. He pretty much didn’t do anything but buy groceries and refuse any contact from SHIELD. Still, Fury held out hope that he could be brought around—eventually—and Phil began restructuring all his plans for the Avengers Initiative (a project that was only mothballed on paper). He couldn’t wait to put this team together and see what they would do.
And time went on. The building Tony had been sketching in holograms was turning into an actual building in New York. And by spring of the next year, he, Tony and Pepper were mostly living there. Darcy had finally wheedled a salary out of SHIELD (she had apparently convinced Jane to threaten to quit and take all of Thor’s good will with her if Darcy didn’t get paid) and so she worked in New Mexico during the week. Phil, much to his surprise, soon found himself reassigned to Erik Selvig’s project in New Mexico, and he couldn’t get away on weekends. Darcy visited his apartment as often as she could.
Selvig was working on using the Tesseract to create a power source. Which struck Phil as very strange since Howard Stark already did that six decades ago. The arc reactor had worked. And now Tony had made the arc reactor much more cost-effective, and smaller, and sometimes portable. And his new building in New York was about to be powered by one. SHIELD could buy arc reactor technology if they wanted. And while Tony didn’t make weapons anymore, Stark Industries still contracted with military and law-enforcement agencies to make other things, and power sources could definitely be on that list. Not to mention the tiny issue of it being illegal for government agencies to function as businesses, so he had no idea how they could market this project. Though Fury clearly planned to at some point.
The worst part about all this was that Phil couldn’t tell Tony. Not that Tony was in any kind of commercial danger from SHIELD’s attempts to create a functional power source using the Tesseract. SHIELD was decades behind Stark, and Selvig, for all his strengths, just wasn’t as smart as Tony. Even if he could figure out how to use it, by the time they could make it affordable, Stark would have shored up the market. But Fury knew that. There was something else going on here. Something that, Phil noted, he was not being kept in the loop on.
Day followed day, in an incredibly boring progression until Phil began to wish for just a tiny bit of trouble to liven things up. Just a little.
And he got his wish.
There was no preamble. No run-up. Nothing happened to indicate that things were about to change. It was simply that one day, Selvig noted a power spike in the Tesseract that just did not quit. And nothing they did could make it stop.
Phil ordered the whole campus evacuated. Much to his surprise, this malfunction apparently merited the personal presence of Director Fury and his ever-present adjutant Maria Hill.
Yes, there was definitely something he wasn’t being told.
Despite getting the campus evacuated much faster than they ever managed in a drill, it wasn’t fast enough. He wasn’t able to find out how many agents they lost that day. Fury ordered him to start assembling the Avengers immediately. But to do it without Barton, since Barton had been compromised by the alien from Asgard who had arrived through the Tesseract. (This day was easily stranger than the day he’d been attacked by the Destroyer.)
Phil did something that night that he had never done before. He disobeyed orders. Rather than calling Romanoff right away, he called Darcy and told her to get Jane out of the country. Ironically, considering the alien invader was an Asgardian, he had them sent to Scandinavia, but Darcy was too close to ground zero. He had no way of knowing where their invader, who he had been told had been identified as Thor’s very hostile little brother Loki, would go next. Since SHIELD had minimal involvement in Norway, and since Loki seemed to be interested in SHIELD, that was as safe a place as he could think of. Pepper was with Tony, so she was safe enough for now.
Then he called Romanoff and sent her for Banner. And since Barton was out, that meant someone had to fill his place. Which meant that he was, somehow, going to have to get Tony back into the Avengers Initiative. And since Tony had turned down all the prior requests, that meant that he was going to have to trick him into it.
The worst part of the whole thing, however, was that it wasn’t even going to be hard.
Phil arrived in the penthouse of Stark Tower to find Tony and Pepper comfortably on their way to a very good evening.
“Phil!” Pepper said excitedly. She leapt up from where she was sitting beside Tony, and rushed over to give him a hug.
Tony gave him a dirty look. “Phil. I thought you were stuck in the Land Of Enchantment.” Dirty looks not withstanding, Phil still rated a quick kiss hello.
“I was. Unfortunately, something has happened,” Phil said. And before he realized it, he was telling them everything. The power spike in the Tesseract, Loki’s attack, Barton’s compromise, and the collapse of the facility.
“We still don’t know how many agents we lost,” he concluded.
“I can be in the suit in—”
“I’m not here for that,” Phil said, cutting Tony off.
Tony gave him an odd look. “Then what are you here for, Agent?” Because, married or not, he still didn’t actually use Phil’s name a good fifty percent of the time.
And this was it. This was the moment when Phil tricked him into the Avengers. “We need a consult,” Phil told him, handing Tony a set of files.
Tony scowled, but took the files and had them on the towers internal holoprojectors in seconds. Steve Rogers’ face, Bruce Banner’s face, the Tesseract, Thor. All of it was laid out together. The blue glow of the holographic Tesseract was echoed in the blue glow of the arc reactor powering Tony’s heart, like a thread of energy woven through their histories.
Tony was enthralled. And just like that, Phil knew he had succeeded in his trick. Because now that Tony had a puzzle to solve, it would drive him nuts until he did so. He was back in the Avengers. He just didn’t know it yet.
As betrayals went, this one wasn’t that bad. And it was to save the world. And he had mitigated it—he hoped—by making sure to give Tony every last scrap of Selvig’s notes. Phil just hoped Tony would forgive him.
Pepper sighed. “So much for that.”
“Just give me a couple hours,” Tony said, turning to her.
She shook her head. “You have homework. You have a lot of homework.”
Phil and Pepper left.
They had just arrived at the airport when his phone started going off. Captain America had agreed to come in and someone needed to escort him to the helicarrier. He tried not to bounce on his toes.
Pepper caught the look on his face. “Well, I suppose it can’t be all bad news.”
“I’m going to meet Captain America. Actually meet him this time,” Phil told him.
Pepper gave him an easy laugh and a hug. “Try not to be too much of a stalker.”
Phil made no promises as he saw her onto her jet to DC.
Captain America turned out to be both bigger and smaller than he had imagined him. In person, awake, he was huge. “All-American offensive linebacker” did not cover it. In terms of sheer size, only Thor was more physically imposing.
But as for presence? Steve Rogers was quiet, liked to draw, and didn’t speak much. And possibly after marrying Tony Stark, Darcy Lewis, and Pepper Potts, all of whom were larger than life in their own ways, Phil was just very hard to overwhelm anymore. But eventually Rogers looked up from the files in the tablet he held. “So this…Doctor Banner was trying to replicate the serum they used on me?”
He sounded guilty. Hoping to divert him, Phil said, “A lot of people were. You were the world’s first superhero. Banner thought gamma radiation might hold the key to unlocking Erskine’s original formula.”
“Didn’t really go his way, did it?” Rogers said, with a heavy sigh.
“Not so much,” Phil agreed. “When he’s not that thing, though, the guy’s like a…Steven Hawking.”
Rogers gave him a confused look. Right. Temporal culture shock. “He’s like a…” and here he paused. While the scientific genius that sprang to mind for World War II was Warner Von Braun, that name had connotations that Rogers, in particular, might not be fond of. “…Albert Einstein?” he tried.
Rogers nodded in understanding.
“I’ve got to say, it’s an honor to meet you,” Phil continued. “Officially. I mean, I sort of met you.” Rogers had a pleasant, but mildly disinterested expression on his face. “I…watched you…while you were sleeping.” Dork!
Rogers face fell.
“I mean,” Phil said, trying again, “I was one of the team that retrieved you from the Arctic.”
That got a self-deprecating, but understanding, expression as Rogers stood and moved to the front of the jet.
“And…it’s really just a huge honor to have you on board,” Phil finished, hoping that did not sound as lame out loud to anyone else as it did to him.
“Well, I hope I’m the man for the job,” Rogers said quietly.
“Oh, you are,” Phil answered. “By the way, we’ve made some modifications to your uniform.”
“Uniform?” Rogers asked. “Aren’t the stars and stripes a little…old fashioned?”
Phil frowned. Certainly there were groups of people who frowned on patriotism in general, but that was hardly a common sentiment. So unless someone had been supplying Rogers with nothing but MSNBC and ThinkProgress, his comment was a very odd one. Especially considering Rogers was a soldier speaking to a government agent. He certainly hadn’t joined SHIELD for any lack of love for the flag. He had a feeling Rogers’ reasons for enlisting were similar.
Out loud, he said, “No.” After a pause he added, “And even if they were, with everything that’s happening? The things that are about to come to light? People might need a little old fashioned.”
When they landed on the deck of the helicarrier, Romanoff had a quick lie about him being needed on the bridge. But Phil did not care, because that meant he could go call Darcy.
Darcy, it turned out, was unhappy. “Do you know how cold it is in Norway?” she said. “And without you or Pepper here to keep me warm, either? Are you sure Jane needs to be here?”
“The alien who came through the Tesseract called himself Loki. He’s Thor’s brother and he’s hostile. He’s already attacked Selvig. There’s every reason to believe he would do the same thing to you or Foster, since you are also Thor’s friends,” Phil replied.
“I hate it when you go all secret-agent-calm like that,” Darcy sighed. “You’re nearly always right when you do it.”
“Darcy,” Phil said, “if the time comes, remember what I taught you. Foster hasn’t had any training at all. You may be the only one who can keep her safe.”
“No pressure, then,” she said.
“You’re whip smart, you tased Thor, and you made SHIELD give you money. I have faith in you,” he answered.
There was a pause on the other end of the line and then Darcy said, “When I see you next, I am going to kiss you breathless.”
“I look forward to it,” Phil answered. They hung up
Loki was a very unsubtle alien invader, since he shortly appeared in Stuttgart, Germany, destroying people’s eyeballs. While most of Phil reacted with the anger that was expected at something like that, there was a part of him that was distantly impressed at the originality. Rogers was able to bring him in, but to everyone’s surprise, he brought Tony and—unbelievably—Thor along with him.
The Thor. Again.
And apparently Tony managed to get under both his and Rogers’ skin before even twenty minutes had passed.
Phil met him on the helicarrier as he was taking the suit off. “You picked a fight with Thor. On purpose. Pepper isn’t going to be pleased.”
“She’s going to be less pleased about you not telling us SHIELD is trying to get me to sue the US government for patent infringement,” Tony replied. “Power sources from the Tesseract is so last century. Stark is working on building cars powered by one of those. Honestly, what are they doing with this?”
“I have not been read into the Tesseract project,” Phil told him, in his driest of dry tones. Because the helicarrier was to SHIELD what the Hoover Building was to the FBI. This was not the place for Phil to be telling Tony how he was counting on him to do exactly what he was doing.
Instead, Tony narrowed his eyes at him for a moment, though the effect was somewhat ruined by his struggle with one of his suit gauntlets that had been dented in his fight with Thor. “Why would they not tell you?”
“Need to know only. SHIELD believes that I don’t.”
That had Tony’s expression going furious, because it had been a long time since Phil had acted anything like this impassive towards him. “So you aren’t gonna tell me anything, either. That’s fine. I’m going to find out anyway.” He angrily stripped the boots from his feet. “Where is Darcy? Is she safe?”
Phil was a little irritated that Tony didn’t think they were on the same team, but given everything that had happened, it was understandable that he was distracted. They’d sort it out at home later, after they’d saved the world. Probably with a lot of yelling. “She’s in Norway with Jane Foster. They’re as safe as they can be right now.”
“Good. When this is over, you have a lot of explaining to do.”
“I look forward to it.”
The two of them headed for the bridge.
Watching Tony bounce around the bridge like an excited five-year-old was half-amusing, half-embarrassing. Though there was a part of Phil that was waiting for him to be impressed. Because the helicarrier was impressive, dammit. Not the concept of it. Flying aircraft carriers were hardly a new idea. But SHIELD’s was fuel efficient, stealth capable, and could actually travel at a decent speed. Nobody but them had ever figured out those last three. And Tony was asking how Fury saw the screens on his left?
When Tony left the bridge without so much as a backward glance at him, Phil was about to move to an empty computer station and bring up video feed of the detention level. Romanoff was going to get first crack at interrogating Loki, and he had no intention of missing the show. But before he could go anywhere, he heard a booming voice from across the bridge. “Son of Coul!”
Phil turned to see Thor striding across the bridge towards him. Honestly, he was a bit surprised Thor even noticed him, considering he’d been standing off to the side.
He told him about sending Foster to Norway. “Handsome fee, private plane. Very remote. She’ll be safe.” He did not tell him that he had been more concerned about Foster’s research assistant. Somehow, “Also, I married your friend Darcy.” seemed a bit too abrupt. And before he could think of a less jarring way of bringing it up, Thor was off onto other topics. Topics that included miming large antlers, something that Phil made a mental note to get security footage to send to Darcy.
The situation deteriorated from there. He and Thor watched Romanoff from a computer station. Loki broke more easily than he had thought, but knowing what he planned for the helicarrier was not, in the long term, what they wanted to know. What Loki planned for the rest of the world was what they wanted, and Loki hadn’t said word one about that. Thor made some noises about wanting to talk to the woman who had out-talked his brother and left.
Phil sighed. Romanoff was not going to give Thor any answers about Loki. The only reason he didn’t already know there were no answers to be had was because he didn’t want to admit his brother was that far gone. And while Romanoff was good, even she couldn’t do a complete personality assessment over a ten-minute interview while she was busy not tipping her own hand the whole time. No, today was going to be a draw. The next move would be—
Something rocked the ship. Hard. An explosion?
He was moving even before Fury’s orders came in over his radio. “Lock down the detention section” was the only logical move from here. Whatever Loki was planning, Loki was bound to be at the center of it. But first, Phil had to make a stop.
The very exciting planning models created from the Destroyer in Puente Antigua had turned into incredibly exciting prototype weaponry. And several of the first generation testing weapons were on board. Phil took one from its place, trying to contain his excitement as he did. He had been itching to play with one of these guns ever since he’d seen them.
He hadn’t even reached the door when he heard a roar. The sound itself was so violent it seemed to rip through the bulkheads of the ship.
The Hulk was now on board. Loki’s plan had worked.
Phil headed for Loki’s prison cell. He arrived to find Thor in the cell and Loki about to drop him from the helicarrier. Loki’s minion was easy enough to dispatch, which allowed him to turn his gun onto Loki himself.
“Move away, please!” he announced.
Looking up from the control console on his former cell, Loki eyed the weapon curiously.
“You like this?” Phil asked. “We started working on the prototype after you sent the Destroyer. Even I don’t know what it does. Do you want to find out?”
And it was here that Phil realized he’d made a mistake. Or rather, here that his mistake was pointed out to him by a searing pain that ripped through his chest. The pain was so incredible that his whole vision whited-out for a moment. He could process no other sensation. But when he began to be aware of other things, he realized that Loki was behind him, but he could see part of that scepter of his protruding from the front of his chest. And that shouldn’t be.
When Loki pulled the scepter back, his knees couldn’t hold him up. Some helpful part of his brain finally kicked in enough to identify this experience as “being stabbed.” He could do nothing but watch as Loki dropped the cage—and Thor—from the the ship.
Loki picked up his scepter and began to walk away.
“You’re going to lose,” Phil said. He wasn’t even sure what made him speak, but he felt like it was something Darcy would do. He could feel the blood flowing out of his back, and there was a lot of it. He was never going to see her face again. He was never going to see any of his family again. So he could not want to spend his last moments doing anything but thinking of them. But acting in ways that reminded him of them.
Loki turned in confusion. “Am I?”
“It’s in your nature.”
Loki scowled. “Your heroes are scattered. Your floating fortress falls from the sky. Where is my disadvantage?”
“You lack conviction.”
And at that, Loki’s face turned to a mask of anger. “I don’t think I—”
But whatever he didn’t think, no one would know. Because Phil had finally gotten his gun around enough for a shot. And he took it. Loki went flying backwards in a blast of flame.
“So that’s what it does,” he said to himself. Pepper would have been proud. He kept calm.
Director Fury was the first person to reach him.
“Sorry, boss,” Phil said, trying not to cough. Every time his ribs moved, it was painful, and he hated to think what a cough would feel like. “The guy rabbited.”
“Just stay awake. Eyes on me,” Fury answered.
He was about to disobey a direct order from Fury for the second time, Phil thought. “No, I’m clocked out here.”
“Not an option.”
Phil shook his head. “Just tell Tony that I’m sorry we couldn’t…have that talk…he was…”
Author’s Notes: TED actually does stand for something, but I thought it’d be more fun if Phil’s phone kept a secret from him. (As it happens, I have mostly forgotten what it stands for too, so I suppose TED is keeping the secret from everyone now. Oh well. It happens like that sometimes.)
I actually talked the helicarrier idea over with military family members. And it’s probably possible now for the US to build something pretty much identical to the one from The Avengers. However, it would most likely be cost prohibitive, both to build and operate (it would crunch through a lot of fuel to keep that thing airborne, especially given how aerodynamic it’s not). And it probably wouldn’t be very strategic. And I don’t think the design in the movie could actually travel very fast IRL.
Chapter One - First Meetings
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Four - Darcy
Chapter Five - Balance
Chapter Seven - Tahiti