Life can Change: What a Marvel Part 4 (20k—>30k) (Patreon)

Mark told the girls and his friends about the invitation that afternoon.

That Tony Stark had personally invited the entire household to the new Stark Tower in Manhattan and that he had agreed to go because Tony was the most relentless human being on the planet.

The reactions were varied.

Ben said no almost before Mark had finished the sentence, which surprised nobody. Ben did not enjoy being looked at by strangers, and a Stark gathering meant being looked at by the worst possible category of strangers. Hank declined politely on the grounds that he had work in the lab he could not put down. Charles smiled and shook his head and said that he had a faculty meeting that simply could not be rescheduled, which Mark suspected was a polite fiction but did not press on. Rogue went bright pink and said she didn't think she'd be comfortable in that kind of setting.

Jessica, on the other hand, sat up so quickly she almost spilled her drink. "Tony Stark has a private collection of alcohol that has its own insurance policy," she said. "I have read about it. There are bottles in that he owns that have not been on the open market in fifty years. There is a Macallan in there that costs more than the sum of my belongings for the past twenty years. If you think I am turning down an opportunity to drink Tony Stark's whisky on Tony Stark's dime in Tony Stark's penthouse, you have learned absolutely nothing about me."

"Noted," Mark said.

Natasha looked up from the corner of the sofa and shifted her hand on her belly. "I'll come too," she said.

Mark looked at her. "You don't have to. If you're tired—"

"Mark," Natasha said gently, "I have been in this apartment, in this mansion, in this very limited radius of motion, for the better part of a month. I love this place and I love you and I love the fact that I am safe here, but if I do not get out of these walls and put on a real dress and stand in a room with a window that looks at something other than the same patch of grass I have been staring at every morning, I am going to lose my mind."

"Okay you're coming," he said simply, and the matter was closed.

Sue took more convincing.

He found her in the lab the, made his pitch and watched her go through the entire sequence of objections that he had expected her to go through. She was busy. She was not really in the mood for that kind of social environment. Stark and her father had a complicated history that she did not particularly want to reopen on her father's behalf. She wasn't sure she had anything appropriate to wear.

Mark let her get through all of it and then said, "Sue. I would really like you to come."

She looked at him for a long moment and then she sighed and said, "Fine. I'll come."

Johnny, when he heard about the gathering, did not need to be asked twice. Johnny needed to be asked precisely zero times. Johnny had been waiting for an excuse to go to any kind of party. He was at the front door of the apartment with a leather jacket on and his hair styled within an inch of its life before Mark had even finished telling him the official version of the plan.

The car that Tony sent was, as promised, both stupid and excellent. It was a long matte-black limousine with tinted windows, it pulled up in front of the mansion's main entrance and the door opened. The bottle of wine in the backseat ice bucket was, by Jessica's immediate assessment, almost criminally expensive. She was halfway through her first glass before they had cleared the mansion gates.

The drive into the city was easy and the traffic parted around the limousine surprisingly. When they pulled up at the base of Stark Tower, Johnny was the first one out, his head tilted all the way back to take in the full vertical sweep of the building.

"How the hell did he refurbish this place this fast," Johnny said to nobody in particular. "I flew past here three weeks ago and it looked like a war monument."

"Money," Mark said, coming around the car to offer Natasha his hand. "It's what happens when you have fuck-you money."

He helped Natasha out of the limo with both hands, one at the small of her back and one supporting her elbow. She was wearing a long dark green dress that draped well over her belly, her hair was loose and she looked, Mark thought, more beautiful than she had ever done.

Sue and Jessica climbed out behind her, Sue in cream and Jessica in something black and well-fitted that she had apparently been keeping in the back of her closet for an occasion exactly like this one.

"Hey," Mark called, and they all paused and looked at him. "Quick warning for the first-timers. Tony is an acquired taste. He talks a lot, he's going to insult at least three of you in the first ten minutes, and approximately seventy percent of what comes out of his mouth is meant as a compliment but doesn't sound like one. Don't take anything he says personally. He doesn't know how to do a normal greeting and he's stopped trying to learn."

"Reassuring," Sue said dryly.

Mark grinned and looked at her. "And you. Keep your brother on a leash."

Johnny, several paces ahead, spun around. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," Mark said. "We are walking into Tony Stark's house. He has expensive things. He has fragile things. He has things that are simultaneously expensive and fragile and that you will be drawn to like a moth to a very flammable lamp. I am asking you, as a friend, to please not set anything on fire."

"I have not set anything on fire in months," Johnny protested.

"You set Jessica's chair on fire last week."

"That was an accident and I put it out."

"You set it on fire because she insulted your hair."

"And I put it out."

"Johnny," Sue said, her voice doing the precise older-sister thing it always did, "if you embarrass me in there, I will tell everyone what happened May 14th 2004."

"You wouldn't."

"I absolutely would and you know it."

Johnny grumbled something under his breath and turned back toward the doors and the rest of them followed.

They crossed the lobby of Stark Tower snd towards the elevator where they were greeted by a voice. "Good evening, Mister Grayson. Good evening, Miss Romanoff, Miss Storm, Mister Storm, Miss Jones. Welcome to Stark Tower. Mister Stark and Miss Potts are currently in the residential penthouse on the eighty-ninth floor. The express elevator on the right is reserved for your party. Please make yourselves comfortable on the way up."

"Hi, Jarvis," Mark said.

"It is a pleasure to see you again, sir," Jarvis replied.

The elevator was as smooth as the rest of it, when the doors opened at the eighty-ninth floor they opened directly into a vast open living space full of glass and the New York skyline spread out beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Pepper was waiting just inside the doors, and Tony was a few steps behind her with both arms already half-raised in the universal gesture of the host who had been waiting for the good part of his evening to arrive.

"There he is," Tony said. "Welcome, all of you, to my new and amazing home. I made a buffet because I do not know how to host a party without going completely overboard and I did not want to disappoint anyone."

The buffet was, in fact, ridiculous.

It stretched along one entire wall of the living space, three long tables pushed together and covered in white linen and stocked with enough food to feed a small army for a week. There was a carving station with a man in a chef's coat behind it. There was an oyster tower. There was an entire smoked salmon laid out on a bed of crushed ice with capers and dill and three kinds of bread arranged around it. 

There was a cheese selection that Mark counted at least twenty varieties. There were small things on small spoons and small things on small skewers and small things in small ceramic bowls and the entire arrangement was lit from above by a row of pendant lamps.

Jessica and Johnny were across the room and at the buffet within four seconds of seeing it. Neither of them said a word to anyone on their way over..

Sue let out a sigh that came up from somewhere very deep. "I am so sorry on his behalf," she said.

"Yeah sorry about Jess..." Mark asked.

Tony shrugged. "It's food, what else are they gonna do with it."

"Tony," he said. "Thanks for the invitation. Genuinely."

"Genuinely accepted," Tony said. "Now introduce me to everyone."

"You know Natasha."

"Of course I know Natasha." Tony released Mark's hand and turned to Natasha with what Mark recognised as his charm-mode. He took her hand briefly and bowed his head over it in a gesture so theatrical it should have been embarrassing and somehow wasn't. "Agent Romanoff. You look radiant. Pregnancy suits you. Although, and I mean this with all due affection, you looked considerably more sexy the night I watched you put four of Hammer's security goons in the hospital at the Stark expo."

"Tony," Pepper said with a sigh.

Natasha laughed. "It's fine. He's not wrong. I do miss the fighting the odd goon." She inclined her head slightly. "It's good to see you, Tony."

"And you must be Sue," Tony said, turning. "Susan Storm. Doctor Susan Storm. I have followed the work of the Foundation for years. I think the early publications you and your father did on cosmic radiation tolerance were genuinely brilliant. I have been a fan of the Storm family scientific output for a long time, all the way up until your father personally rejected my offer to buy the Baxter Building, after which I became significantly less of a fan. Briefly. I'm over it now. Mostly."

Mark sighed audibly.

"Tony," Pepper said again, with slightly more warning in it.

"I am behaving," Tony protested. "This is me behaving. This is the behaved version. You should hear the other version."

"They really should not," Pepper said. "Hi, Susan. I'm Pepper. Please ignore everything that comes out of his mouth for at least the first fifteen minutes. Once he gets the showing-off out of his system he becomes almost human."

Sue smiled, and it was a real smile. "It's nice to meet you, Pepper."

"Now," Tony said, clapping his hands together, "Natasha, Susan, with me, I want to walk you through the buffet personally because there are at least four things on that table that you will not recognise and that I am going to show off. Pepper, you handle the big guy. Mark, do not break anything. I'll see you in a minute."

He swept off across the room with Natasha on one arm and Sue on the other, talking animatedly the entire way, Pepper watched him go with an expression of long-suffering affection. She then turned to Mark and her face shifted into something warmer. "Good to see you again, Mark," she said, and she stepped forward and hugged him.

He returned it and held her for a moment. He and Pepper had known each other for nearly as long as he'd known Tony, ever since the Vanko situation, and there had always been a good friendship between them that ran independently of his relationship with Tony. 

"It's good to see you, Pepper. You look great," Mark said with a smile. 

"I look exhausted," she said with a small laugh. "But thank you. How are you. Tell me honestly. How are you doing. The recovery from fight, the city, all of it. I have been worried about you and Tony refuses to tell me anything that he hears about you."

"I'm doing well," Mark said, and meant it more than he had expected to. "It's been a hard month, I'm not going to pretend it hasn't, but I'm working on it. I have good people around me and I'm getting some help and the city is getting back on its feet faster than I expected. I'm okay, Pepper. Really. How are you?"

"Oh, absolutely buried," she said with a wave of her hand. "Stark Industries does not run itself, no matter how many times Tony insists it does. The clean energy initiative is taking up most of my waking hours right now and most of my sleeping hours too. We are pushing very hard on rolling out the next generation of arc reactor technology to municipal power grids. Smaller deployments first, three pilot cities in upstate New York and two in Florida, with the goal of taking entire metropolitan areas off fossil fuels within the next five years. It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly expensive and the political resistance has been worse than we expected, but we're getting traction."

"That's amazing," Mark said, and meant that too. "That's actually exactly the kind of thing I've been wanting to get more involved in. The humanitarian and infrastructure side of things. I've been thinking a lot about how to use what I can do for that kind of work instead of just punching things, and clean energy rollout is right at the top of the list."

Pepper's eyes lit up.

"We should talk about that. Properly. Not tonight, tonight is a party and Tony will lose his mind if I drag you into a corner and start pitching you on partnerships, but soon. I would love to have a real conversation with you about what kind of role you might want to play. There are things you could do for that initiative that nobody else on Earth can do."

"I'd like that," Mark said. "Send me a time. I'll come to the tower."

"I will. I promise."

...

The evening unfolded from there.

They ate. They drank. Jessica and Johnny made multiple trips back to the buffet and Johnny held a long animated conversation with Tony about engine design that Sue interrupted twice to keep him from saying something embarrassing. Natasha sat on one of the long couches near the windows with a plate balanced on the curve of her belly and her feet up on a footstool and looked happier than Mark had seen her in weeks. Pepper joined her there for a stretch and the two of them fell into conversation. 

He was about half an hour into his second drink when Tony appeared at his elbow and tilted his head toward a side door. "Hey," Tony said. "Got a minute. There's something I want to show you in the lab."

Mark looked at him then sighed. "There it is," he said.

"There what is."

"The ulterior motive. I knew there was one," Mark added. 

Tony raised both hands palm-out. "I will admit nothing. I will say only that there is a thing in the lab that I think you should see and that it would be in both of our interests for you to see it sooner rather than later. That is all I am admitting to. Officially I invited you because I missed you."

Mark sighed and set his drink down on the nearest surface. "Lead the way."

The lab was, as Tony had said, just one room over, accessible through a door that read perfectly normally and opened onto a space that absolutely did not match the rest of the residential floor.

Tony walked to one of the central tables and leaned back against it and crossed his arms.

"Okay," Mark said, stopping a few feet away. "What's up."

"I will be brief, since I know you are going to be irritated with me regardless of how I phrase it," Tony said with an irritating smile. 

"The world is in a bit of a situation right now. I have been pulled into this situation against my better judgement and I am now in the early stages of trying to assemble something that resembles a response. The short version is that an item of considerable significance has been stolen from a SHIELD research facility. The item in question is called the Tesseract and the man who stole it is named Loki and as far as anyone has been able to confirm he is an actual literal Asgardian with actual magic powers and a personal grudge against his actual brother, who you may have heard of."

Mark let out a small breath through his nose.

"So that's what Fury was talking about."

Tony's eyebrows went up. "Fury talked to you about this."

"Fury talked to me about a missing weapon and a missing scientist and a request that I keep my eyes open. He very conveniently left out the parts about the Tesseract and the Asgardian. Which, on reflection, is exactly what I should have expected from him."

"Spies am I right?" Tony said an exasperated laugh. 

"Are you with SHIELD now, Tony?" Mark asked. 

Tony laughed. "God, no. Absolutely not. I am with myself. I have always been with myself. My interest in this entire situation is the Tesseract and the Tesseract alone, and my interest in the Tesseract is making sure it ends up in the smallest possible number of unsavoury hands."

"Does unsavoury hands include SHIELD?"

"You bet your alien ass it does," Tony said. "I have read enough internal SHIELD memo to know that the people at the top of that organisation should not be allowed to own a glow-stick, let alone an energy source of unknown origin and unlimited potential. If I have my way the Tesseract goes into a vault in this building and nobody outside ever lays hands on it again."

Mark was quiet for a moment. "I'd like to help, Tony. I really would. But I'm on a break from this kind of thing right now. Therapist's recommendation. I'm trying to step back from the hero work for a while and focus on rebuilding myself."

Tony's mouth opened in delight. "You have a therapist?"

"Tony."

"You have an actual therapist."

"Yes I have a therapist, please do not make a big deal out of it."

"Fine, but I'm definitely still interested in what goes on behind those doors" Tony said. "But fine... I won't push you on the Tesseract thing."

Mark waited.

"However," Tony said, "there is something else I wanted to talk about, and this is the actual real reason I dragged you in here."

Mark sighed. "What."

Tony tapped a panel on the table behind him and the room's central display flickered to life. A holographic recording opened in the air between them, footage that Mark recognised immediately because he had lived through it. It was the day of the Magneto fight, taken from satellite vantage. The image showed the city skyline and then it showed a particular point in the sky where the air had warped and folded inward and a single figure had punched through reality and arrived. 

Him. The moment of his return from Limbo.

Tony zoomed in on the warp point and overlaid a series of energy readings across the image, lines of data scrolling along the edges of the display. "When you came back from wherever you came back from," Tony said, "you generated a shockwave. A specific kind of shockwave. It was not seismic and it was not electromagnetic in any conventional sense and it did not behave like any energy signature in any database I have access to. It was picked up by every sensitive instrument I own in my Malibu lab. I have spent the last several weeks comparing the readings against everything I have ever measured in my entire career. "

He tapped another control and the display zoomed in further on the data. "Mark. The energy that came off you in that moment was extraordinary. It was richer than anything coming out of an arc reactor by orders of magnitude. The output spike alone, in the half-second of your arrival, contained more usable energy than my entire R and D division has produced in a calendar year. And the signature of it was unlike anything I have ever seen. So I am asking you, friend to friend, scientist to alien, do you know what I'm looking at."

Mark was quiet.

He stood there for a long moment, looking at the holographic data, weighing in his head exactly how much to share and exactly how much to keep to himself. "I'll tell you what I know," Mark said finally. "Which honestly isn't as much as you'd think. But I know what it is in broad strokes. In Limbo, there's a very rare substance that exists naturally in the dimension."

"The locals call promethium."

"It's a power source that's connected to the fabric of the dimension itself, and from the limited testing I was able to do while I was there, my best guess is that it represents something close to an unlimited energy reserve. And it isn't just powerful. The thing that makes it remarkable is that it can mimic other forms of energy. You feed it the right kind of structural framework to work with, and it will produce whatever energy signature you ask it to produce. At least within the limits I was able to test."

Tony's eyes had gone very wide.

"I absorbed some of it," Mark continued. "I held it inside myself and I shaped it into something that mimicked Bifrost energy, the same kind of dimensional travel signature that the Asgardians use, and that's how I got home. The shockwave you picked up was probably the promethium entering our dimension and the wake of limbo collapsing."

Tony stared at him for several long seconds without saying anything. "Mark," he said eventually, "that is the most incredible thing anyone has ever said to me. Can I see it. Can I please see it. Can I examine even a microscopic sample. I am asking you with all the dignity I can muster which is admittedly not very much."

"It's hidden," Mark said.

Tony's face fell. "Hidden where."

Mark hesitated for a moment, then shrugged.

"The moon."

Tony stared at him. "The moon. As in, our moon. The big grey one in the sky that we can see at night. That moon."

"That moon."

"You hid it on the moon."

"I hid it on the moon."

"Mark, that is, with respect, slightly overkill."

Mark shrugged with a small smile. "I'm the only person on this planet who can casually fly to the moon and back without dying. So from a practical standpoint it's actually the most secure location available to me. Anyone who wants it has to be able to get to it, and almost nobody can. Maybe not overkill. Maybe just the correct amount of kill."

Tony rubbed his face with both hands. "Okay. Okay. I respect the logic. I hate the logic but I respect it."

"I'm going to start running some experiments on it soon," Mark said. "I want to actually understand what I'm dealing with before anyone else gets near it. When I'm ready to start, I'll tell you. You can come and look at it and we can run tests together. I'd actually appreciate having a second set of eyes who can build the kind of instrumentation we'd need."

Tony's whole expression brightened. "Really."

"Really."

"Mark, that is genuinely one of the most generous things anyone has ever said to me in this lab and you should know that I am right now actively suppressing a level of enthusiasm that would embarrass both of us if I let it out. Thank you. I will not bother you about it. I will wait for the call. I will sit by the phone like a teenager waiting for prom. I will—"

"Sir," Jarvis's voice broke in from overhead, polite as ever, "I apologise for the interruption. You have a priority call from Agent Maria Hill on the secure line. She has indicated it is urgent."

Tony made a face. "Ugh. Fine. Put her through. On speaker."

The call connected with a soft chime and Maria Hill's voice came through clearly into the lab. "Stark, we have a hit on Loki. He just surfaced in Stuttgart, Germany. We have Captain Rogers en route but we are looking at a significant force disparity if Loki has any of the capabilities like his brother. We could use the backup. I'm authorised to ask you directly. Are you in."

"I'm in," Tony said immediately. "Get me the coordinates, I am leaving in three minutes."

"Sending them now. Hill out."

The line clicked dead.

Tony turned to Mark and his eyes were already alight

"So," he said. "About that fight break of yours."

"Tony."

"I am asking. I am simply asking. I am acknowledging that you are on a fight break and I am also asking, in the spirit of friendship and one-time exceptions, whether you would consider riding along."

"Tony, I told you. I am stepping back. I have a therapist now and everything. I am working on being a peaceful hero."

"I am not asking you to fight anyone. I am asking you to come and look impressive. Stand in the background. Cross your arms. Be very tall and very intimidating. Loki is famously dramatic. He will see you and immediately reconsider being a villain. You don't have to throw a single punch. Your presence is the punch."

"Tony."

"Mark."

"Tony."

"Mark, please. Think of the optics. Think of how good we will look on the news together. Think of my ego, which needs you for this. Think of Steve, who i am sure is a wonderful man but who is going up against what is probably an actual literal Norse god with nothing but a shield and a very handsome face. Think of the children. Think of the puppies."

"There are no puppies in this scenario."

"There could be puppies. I am willing to introduce puppies to the scenario if it improves my chances. Mark, please. One time. One ride-along. You can stand there and not lift a finger and I will personally write you a thank you note and send you a fruit basket the size of a small horse."

Mark stared at him for several seconds. Then he sighed and his shoulders dropped half an inch. "Fine," he said. "Fine. I'll come. But I am not fighting. I am there as backup and crowd control. I will keep civilians out of the line of fire and I will stay back from the actual confrontation. That is the deal. Take it or leave it."

"Taken," Tony said instantly. "Taken, accepted, signed, notarised, and entered into the official record of our friendship. You will not regret this. Actually you might regret this. But I will not regret this and that is what matters."

He pressed a control on the table.

The floor beneath his feet split open in three engineered segments and a robotic assembly arm rose smoothly out of the cavity, and then another, and another, and within seconds the components of one of his suits were unfolding around his body. By the time the last plate clicked into place over his shoulder he was fully armoured and the helmet was retracted and the eye-slits were dark and ready.

"I love that part," he said. "I never get tired of it."

They went back into the main room.

Conversation paused as the two of them re-entered, Tony in full Iron Man and Mark looking like a man who had just eaten a whole Lemon. Pepper saw the suit and her face went immediately to an expression that contained no surprise and a great deal of resignation.

"There's a situation," Tony said, addressing the room. 

"Stuttgart. Apologies for cutting the evening short. Pepper, you've got the rest of the night. Mark is coming with me to hold my hand. We will be back. Probably."

"Probably," Pepper repeated flatly.

"Definitely... probably," Tony amended.

Mark went to Natasha first. He knelt down beside the couch where she was sitting and put one hand on her knee and looked at her properly. "Tony talked me into going as backup. I'll be back later tonight."

Natasha's eyes searched his face for a moment. "Be safe," she said with a smile and reached up and pulled him in by the back of the neck and kissed him. 

He stood up and turned to Jessica, who was on the same couch with a fresh drink in her hand and the slight haziness of someone who had been working through Tony's whisky collection with serious dedication.

"Watch her for me," he said.

"Always," Jessica said. "Go save the world or whatever."

"Wait," Johnny said, his head snapping up from across the room. "Wait, hold on, what's happening, where are we going."

"We are not going anywhere," Sue said immediately. "You are staying here."

"Sue—"

"Johnny. You are staying here. I am not having you fly into an active situation in Germany during what was supposed to be a social evening. Tony and Mark have it. Sit down."

"Sis, come on, I can help, I—"

"Sit. Down."

Johnny sat down with the body language of a teenager being publicly grounded.

Mark gave Sue a small grateful nod and then joined Tony at the windows, which had already opened along a section of the wall to expose a clean launch path out into the night sky.

"Ready, big guy?"

"Let's go."

They stepped off together.

The night air took them as they climbed fast, the lights of Manhattan dropping away beneath them. They cleared the city in under a minute and arced east over the Atlantic.

...

They had been flying for about ten minutes and had cleared the coast and were well out over open water when Mark caught a flicker of orange in the corner of his eye.

He turned his head.

A fireball was flying just off his right shoulder, matching their speed exactly, and at its centre was Johnny Storm with the biggest grin Mark had ever seen on his face.

Mark chucked. 

"Mommy storm isn't going to be happy." Tony started, his helmet snapping over to look.

"How did you get out of that room. Sue had you locked down like a prison transfer," Mark asked. 

Johnny's grin widened. "I asked Jarvis to do an impression of our dad's voice and have it call her into the next room to help with something urgent. She bolted out of the lounge so fast she left her drink on the table. By the time she figured out it was a fake I was gone."

Mark stared at him for a beat and then he laughed again. 

Tony was already laughing. "Jarvis," Tony said, "did you do that."

"I am afraid I cannot legally confirm that, sir, as Miss Storm has indicated she will be having strong words with me upon her return," Jarvis replied. "Oh, Johnny, you magnificent idiot. Welcome to the team. Try not to set me on fire, the suit doesn't like it."

"No promises," Johnny said.

"Try to keep your power contained when we get there, don't want to cause too much collateral," Mark said. "Are we clear."

"Crystal," Johnny said, and immediately went into a barrel roll.

Mark shook his head and pushed forward and the three of them tore on across the night sky toward Germany.

_____________________________________

The plaza in front of the museum in Stuttgart was old and beautiful and full of people in evening wear who had moments ago been attending a gala for one of Europe's more celebrated cultural institutions.

That had been five minutes ago.

Now the gala-goers were on their knees in the middle of the plaza, hundreds of them, herded into a tight kneeling crowd by the absurdly elegant figure who stood above them on the museum's front steps in a green cape and a horned helmet and an expression of satisfaction so complete it was almost a costume in itself.

Loki held the Scepter loosely in one hand and turned slowly on the steps to take in the kneeling crowd from every angle, savouring it.  "Kneel before me," he said. "I said. Kneel!!!!"

The crowd was kneeling.

"Is not this simpler?" he continued, walking slowly down the steps with the Scepter trailing easily at his side. "Is this not your natural state? It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

Somewhere in the crowd an old man, frail and grey-haired, began the slow painful business of climbing to his feet. He could not have been less than eighty. His hands were trembling on the cobblestones as he pushed himself up.

Loki saw him and smiled.

"Look to your elder, people," he said. "Let him be an example."

He raised the Scepter and a beam of blue energy gathered at its tip and shot toward the old man with a sound like splitting glass. Something silver and red and white slammed down out of the sky directly into the path of the beam, and the energy splashed harmlessly off the front of the shield that Captain America held in front of him as he landed in a crouch between Loki and the old man.

"You know," Steve said, straightening slowly and adjusting the shield on his arm, "the last time I was in Germany, and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing." He looked at Loki. "This world's already had enough men who wanted to be kings, pal. We don't need another one."

Loki turned slowly to face him, and his smile grew.

"The soldier," he said. "A man out of time."

"I'm not the one who's out of time." He came down off the steps and threw the shield.

It cracked across Loki's chest before Loki could fully bring the Scepter up and Loki staggered back two steps, the shield ricocheted off and Steve caught it on the rebound and was already moving forward, closing the distance. He went in and drove a shoulder up under Loki's guard, and put his fist into the side of the Asgardian's jaw with everything he had.

Loki took the hit. He took it, and then he laughed.

Then... he moved.

The Scepter came around in a sweeping arc that Steve barely got the shield up in time to block, the impact rang across the plaza like a bell and lifted Steve clean off his feet and threw him back twenty feet across the cobblestones. Steve hit the ground rolling and came up in a crouch with the shield still on his arm and his teeth set, Loki was already advancing on him with that same elegant unhurried walk.

"You are out of your league, Captain," Loki said pleasantly. "I respect the courage of the gesture. I do. There is something charming about a man who throws himself in front of a bullet for a stranger. But you are not what I am,  you have simply brought a relic to a war." He swung the Scepter again. Steve blocked it with the shield. The force of the impact drove him to one knee. 

The cobblestones beneath his boot cracked.

Loki was about to bring the Scepter down a third time when an AC/DC riff filled the plaza from somewhere in the air above them and a pulse of repulsor fire caught him directly in the chest and threw him back ten feet, Tony Stark dropped down out of the night sky and landed in a tsuperhero pose on the cobblestones. 

"Make a move, Reindeer Games," Tony said, both palms raised and humming. "Go ahead. I'm dying for an excuse."

Loki, halfway back to his feet, raised both hands slowly and the Scepter's tip dipped towards Tony as it started glowing. Only asecond later a streak of fire roared down out of the sky on Tony's right and Johnny Storm landed in a flame-burst that scorched a circular pattern into the cobblestones around his feet.

"Sorry I flew into a flock of seagulls did I miss the superhero landing?!" Johnny called brightly. "Is this the Norse god? He is shorter than I expected. Hi, Norse god. I'm a big fan of your brother."

Tony sighed and turned to him. "Come on Johnny you ruined my whole entrance, I told you we had to land together otherwise it would be less intimidating."

"What is going on here?" Steve said a little confused as he looked at Tony and Johnny.

"I'm Johnny. I'm with him." Johnny jerked a thumb at Tony. "Not in a relationship kind of way... just a sort of normal way... not that the relationship way isn't normal... I'm just well... here for support."

"Excellent support Johnny," Tony said. "Loki, this is Johnny Storm. Johnny, this is the Asgardian war criminal we are about to escort into custody. Please do not set him completely on fire, we are supposed to bring him in alive."

"Mostly alive," Johnny said.

"Mostly alive is acceptable."

Loki's eyes had narrowed slightly. He took a single step backward and the Scepter came back up  and the air around him began to ripple faintly. "It seems I'll have to squash a few more insects."

The fight that followed lasted thirty seconds.

Steve came in from the left with his shield up and Tony hit Loki from the right with a sustained repulsor barrage, while Johnny laid down a curtain of flame across Loki's escape angles, herding him into the middle of the plaza where there was no cover and no civilians close enough for him to use as a shield. 

Loki blocked the first repulsor pulse with the Scepter and ducked the second and threw an energy bolt at Steve that Steve caught on the shield, the impact sent shockwaves out across the plaza.

While the three of them worked Loki over, Mark waited.

He was in the air above the plaza, exactly as he had said he would be, his arms folded and his attention not on the fight but on the crowd. The civilians were starting to scatter, panicked, running in every direction at once, and the fight beneath him was throwing off enough collateral that any one of them could have been killed by a stray pulse if nobody was watching for it. He watched. He saw a stray bolt from the Scepter glance off Steve's shield and ricochet toward a young woman in a red dress and he was there before it reached her, intercepting the bolt with one hand and slapping it away harmlessly while she ran past him without ever realising what had almost happened. 

He saw a chunk of cobblestone the size of a refrigerator go flying from where one of Tony's rockets hit the ground, he caught it in mid-air over the heads of three sprinting partygoers and gently set it down on a clear patch of pavement. He moved through the air over the plaza like a shepherd, redirecting danger away from the people who could not survive it.

Tony, on the other hand, was escalating the violence below with great enthusiasm.

"You know what your problem is, Reindeer Games?" Tony said, hovering five feet off the ground and pummelling Loki with an alternating rhythm of repuleor shots. "Your problem is that you came down here wearing what looks like a discount Halloween costume and you assumed nobody would call you on it. You are dressed like a mid-tier opera villain. Are you aware of this. The horns are a choice. They are a choice that someone made and that nobody told you was a bad choice and that is the real tragedy here."

"Hey Tony," Johnny called, sweeping around behind Loki and shooting him in the back with a fireball that sent him flying forward, "should we be giving him fashion advice or should we be hitting him."

"Why not both," Tony said, and hit Loki again.

Steve closed in from the third side, his shield came around in an arc that caught Loki square across the back of the helmet with a clang that echoed across the plaza, Loki staggered, and Tony hit him with a sustained beam that drove him to one knee, and Johnny brought a torrent of flame down across his body that made him yell out in pain. Finally Steve was on him before he could recover, the shield being thrown in strike that knocked the Scepter spinning out of Loki's hand across the cobblestones.

Loki knelt in the centre of the plaza with his hands raised in the universal gesture of surrender, blood running from a cut at the corner of his mouth, his costume burnt to a crisp and parts of his skin burnt and red raw. 

"I yield," Loki said breathlessly.

His eyes drifted past Steve and Tony and Johnny and found Mark, hovering twenty feet up in the air with his arms still folded and his expression unreadable. For a moment Loki simply looked at him. Then his smile widened a fraction and he tilted his head in a gesture that was almost a bow. "Well well well," Loki said, his voice carrying across the plaza. "I did not expect the famous Invincible to make an appearance. I have heard so much about you. I was, I will admit, rather hoping our paths would not cross this evening."

"Tell me. Why did you not join the fight. Surely a being of your capabilities could have ended this in considerably less time than your friends have spent on it. Was it modesty? Was it boredom? Was it something else?"

Mark looked down at him from the air. "Semi retired," he said. 

Loki's smile tightened into something that was almost respectful. "Semi retired," he repeated softly. "How interesting."

The whine of approaching engines interrupted them as a SHIELD Quinjet dropped down out of the night sky on the far side of the plaza and settled onto the cobblestones with its rear ramp already lowering, Steve immediately moved to haul Loki to his feet by the upper arm. Johnny stepped in to take the other arm and the two of them marched the still-smiling Asgardian across the plaza toward the waiting jet.

Tony watched them go for a moment and then turned and walked over to where the Scepter lay on the cobblestones. He bent down and picked it up by the shaft, holding it out at arm's length. "Hey, big guy," he called up. "Think fast." He tossed the Scepter underhand into the air toward Mark.

Mark caught it out of the sky.

The moment his fingers closed around the shaft something passed through his hand and up his arm and into his chest, a strange humming sensation that did not quite resemble any energy he had felt before. It was not hot and it was not cold. It was not electrical exactly and it was not magnetic exactly. 

It felt almost like a voice. 

Except the voice was not speaking in any language and was not addressing him directly, yet something in the back of his mind became very faintly aware of his presence in a way that prickled at the edge of his attention and would not quite resolve into a coherent thought.

He turned the Scepter slowly in his hands and looked at the jewel at its tip. The blue inside the gem was glowing and seemed to look back at him.

"What do you make of it?" Tony called up.

Mark frowned and lowered himself slowly down through the air until his boots touched the cobblestones beside Tony. "I'm not sure," he said. "Whatever's coming off it, it's strange. It's not like anything I've felt before. But there's something inside it. Something that's aware. I can feel it, just barely, at the edge of my mind. It's not strong enough to do anything to me but it's there."

Tony's helmet retracted with a faint mechanical hiss and his actual face looked at Mark. "That is an extremely unsettling description and I would like you to know that I am storing it for future analysis."

"Store away."

"We should get going," Tony said, glancing across the plaza where the last of the civilians were being shepherded away by the German police who had finally arrived in force. "Before someone with a phone notices that two of the most photographed men in the world are standing in the middle of Stuttgart and floods us for autographs."

Mark nodded and tucked the Scepter under one arm.

"Let's go," he said.