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Chapter Text

Loki was not, and never had been, a good man.  For that matter, whether or not he’d ever been a good boy was debatable.  His mother would argue that he had, but she would very likely be the only one.  Well, except for Thor, perhaps, but that was because he was an idiot who could drown in three inches of nostalgia.  Like he didn’t remember every time Loki had humiliated him.  Maybe he didn’t, for all that he kept falling for the same trick over and over again. 

It made Loki’s late nights studying the arts of illusion, misdirection, and lying seem redundant.  Almost.  Not everyone was as dense as his big brother. 

No.  Loki had never been a good man.  He had, however, been a free man. 

Free to run or hide.  Free to explore the nooks and crannies of Asgard, to uncover her secrets in ways few cared to do.  Free to walk hidden paths between the Nine Realms and even farther flung territories, where his people did not and had never ruled, to play games, make deals, have adventures, take risks.  To be.  To exist as his own creature. 

He had been free.  He had. 

But on one of those little secret excursions, he had discovered something that had made even his flippant, slippery heart clench with fear.  A ravening plague, spreading across the stars.  The death of half of everything on the horizon. 

Loki was not a good man.  What cause did he have to care for all the sundry others in the universe?  There were too many.  It was too much to ask. 

But Asgard—His home, even though the had long ago realized the blood in his veins originated on very different soil.  That was different. 

Asgard, he could help.  Asgard could survive. 

But it had to be strong.  It had to have strong allies.  None of this barely-held peace, this enemy eternally at their gates.  It needed strong leadership.  Not his brother’s simplistic view and longing for the glory of war. 

Loki was not a good man.  But he was one who could get things done. 

Before he knew it, he had burned all his bridges behind him.  In one case, a literal bridge that was literally broken. 

And he fell. 

And he fell. 

And he fell right into the hands of the one he had feared enough to do this.  Broken enough for poison to drip into the cracks.  No one knew where he was, no one could know where he was, except, perhaps, Heimdal, and Loki sincerely doubted Heimdal cared.  No one was coming for him.  No one was looking for him.  No rescue was forthcoming. 

He was alone. 

Asgardians were considered gods for a reason.  Their bodies and minds were much more resilient than the average mortal’s.  But Thanos’s people had been titans, and there was a reason for that, too. 

Thanos enjoyed breaking him. 

And Loki turned his lies on himself.  A skilled master of games always had one gifted opponent, even alone.  Hadn’t he wanted to rule?  To command?  To see a world, any world, prostrate at his feet?  To be given the recognition and praise of which he was so worth?

To pull something, anything, out of the fire?

(If he had spent less time learning how to spin lies and more on how to see the truth, he might not have believed it.  A better, wiser, man would have.  But Loki was not a good man.  And he was very skilled in his craft.)

So, his new master put a weapon in his hands, and he went off to conquer a world. 

.

Danny was used to rude awakenings.  He was used to those rude awakenings being full body chills and ghosts, not someone knocking on his door. 

Blearily, he pulled himself out from under the blankets.  Quasi-military government facility or not, the beds were comfortable.  Maybe Mom or Dad had gotten themselves locked out of their room?  Or Jazz—No, not Jazz, she hadn’t come with them.  She was at college, not being flown places by Mom and Dad’s suspiciously generous new consulting job. 

At least it wasn’t the GIW. 

He stood on tiptoe (curse his perpetually short body) to peer out the peephole.  His parents’ buff, one-eyed, and incredibly imposing new boss stood in front of the door, hands on his hips, slightly sweeping back his long dark coat.  If Danny listened carefully, he could hear two other people near the door, and… was that an alarm?  Yes.  Faint, but present, was a warning klaxon. 

Okay.  Danny would bet his right arm that something had gone horribly wrong with whatever his parents were consulting on.  Didn’t explain why the boss was in front of his door. 

Unless they’d gotten the rooms mixed up, somehow?

Ugh.  Danny wasn’t paid enough to deal with this. 

He opened the door.  “What-?”

“Phantom,” intoned eyepatch guy with great solemnity. 

Danny immediately tried to close the door.  The guy stuck his foot in the jamb, and, sure, Danny could have crushed it, but that would be a jerk move.  He didn’t think this guy was going for a pirate look, after all.

“We need your help.”

.

“I’m not sure what you think I can help you with,” yelled Danny over the beating of the helicopter blades.  He’d remained stubbornly in human form.  “My parents are the scientists.  This sounds like a science thing.  Not a punching-people thing.”

“We spoke to them earlier,” said Fury, “and we have plenty of scientists working on the theories they brought up.  You’re the one with practical experience.”

“Practical experience in what?”

“Interdimensional portals,” said the woman, who had yet to introduce herself. 

As if this whole thing wasn’t already giving him a bad feeling.  “My parents built an interdimensional portal.  Again, you should be talking to them.  They’re the ones you’re paying.”

“We could pay you, too,” said Fury, “but we assumed you would want to avoid letting your parents know about this, as you’re still a minor and they have control of your bank accounts.”

Danny stared flatly.  “This is blackmail.”

“We aren’t threatening you,” pointed out the woman. 

“Emotional blackmail,” said Danny, glaring, daring her to challenge him on whether or not he actually knew what blackmail was. 

In the meantime, the helicopter landed.  Danny unbuckled and hopped out, trailing slightly awkwardly behind Fury and the woman.  He didn’t want to stand out, but he suspected that, being the only kid here and being in the general vicinity of Fury, who radiated authority, that was a lost cause. 

“This is Agent Coulson.  Coulson, this is Phantom.”

Danny’s mouth went dry(er) at how casual the introduction was.  His eyes went nervously to all the other people running around the field.  With all the noise, it was unlikely anyone had heard, but still…

“Can you not?  Secret identity and all?  Unless you’ve told everyone here already, which, rude.”

Fury sighed.  “How bad is it?” he asked Coulson. 

“We’re not sure,” said Coulson.  “That’s the problem.  Big fan of your work, by the way,” he added as an aside to Danny.  He glanced at the woman.  “Agent Hill.”

“Background?” asked Fury as he led the way into the building. 

“The first energy surge was four hours ago.  Dr. Selvig’s equipment picked it up – He’s the head scientist on this project.”

“Dr. Selvig isn’t authorized to test,” said Fury.  “We wanted to run his plans by the Fentons.”

“He wasn’t testing.  He wasn’t even in the room.  He called it ‘spontaneous advancement.’”

“It turned itself on?”

“What are the energy levels?” asked Fury before Hill’s question could be answered. 

“Climbing,” said Coulson. 

“Mr. Fenton,” said Fury, “any comments?”

“Look, I don’t even know what this thing that you built looks like or what it’s a door to.”  Danny frowned as a thought occurred to him.  “You’re not expecting me to fight whatever comes out of it, are you?  Because, unless you’ve got a ghost portal down there, I can’t make guarantees.”

“It’s called the Tesseract,” said Coulson.  “It’s supposed to be a connection to the other side of space.  A source of unlimited energy.  At least,” there was a note of humor in his voice despite the evacuation taking place around them, “that’s what the scientists say.”

“A door to space?” asked Danny, firmly shoving down his excitement at the prospect.  “Like, a Stargate?”  It was no good, he could practically feel himself sparkling.  He took a firm grip of his core and reminded himself he might need to fight before the end of the day. 

“Well, no,” said Coulson.  “It’s this little… cube… thing.”  He made a shape with his hands. 

“Oh,” said Danny, mind still whirring.  “You know, if it’s really a tesseract, it isn’t a cube in just three dimensions, so bigger things could come out of it than you’d think.”  He’d seen some weird portals in the Ghost Zone. 

“Well, right now, we’re just getting energy.”  They entered a large room with an extremely sci-fi setup.  It looked like they were planning to shoot some kind of laser across the room onto a platform surrounded by strange-looking panels.  There were men with guns scattered around in what was probably a well thought out formation Danny couldn’t see.  There was also a dude with a bow sitting up in the rafters.  He frowned down at Danny as he noticed Danny noticing him.

“Dr. Selvig!”

“Director!”

“What do we know?”

Danny allowed himself to be distracted by the centerpiece of the room, a piece of machinery built around what was indeed a little cube thing.  He tilted his head and approached, trying to get a better view of it around the people in lab coats and protective gear currently swarming it.  He caught mention of radiation a grimaced. 

It was unlikely to kill him, but, really, everyone here should probably be wearing more PPE.  You never knew what was going to come out of an interdimensional portal, after all.  Except trouble.  Trouble was a pretty safe bet. 

It was pretty.  Blue.  Reminded him a little of a blue raspberry ice pop.  Part of him wanted to lick it.  Which was stupid.  He didn’t want to wind up half what-ever-lived-on-the-other-side on top of his regular ghost nonsense. 

“Mr. Fenton?”

Danny jumped and turned, refocusing on the adults, who had multiplied while he’d been daydreaming.  The guy with the bow had joined them.

“Mr. Fenton?  Like the Doctors Fenton I spoke to earlier?” asked Selvig. 

“Yeah, it’s—”

This, of course, was when everything decided to explode.  Sort of. 

The blue cube shot out a beam of energy that had more than a little in common with the Fenton Bazooka’s portal setting.  The beam terminated on the platform, a portal rapidly forming. 

Danny slid into a fighting stance, and barely even noticed as blue energy washed over the room, throwing many less-prepared people back. 

Something shaped like a man stepped through the portal. 

Danny did not break his stance.  Still.   “An alien,” he whispered, eyes wide.  If they were friendly, maybe they’d answer his questions about space.  If they weren’t friendly, maybe they’d answer his questions about space after Danny beat them up. 

(Danny did not go ghost.  Did not even think about going ghost.  There were too many people here, and the space was too open.)

Fury attempted to negotiate.  Danny approved.  Not everything that came through an interdimensional portal was necessarily evil. 

Except this guy apparently was.  Go figure.  He could also deflect bullets and was very good with throwing knives, which led to Danny having to pull several of the gun guys out of their own line of fire as well as the alien’s line of knife.  Who would have thought an alien’s weapon of choice would be throwing knives?  The energy-blasting spear was much more in line with his expectations. 

The bow guy proved to be more competent than the gun guys.  This didn’t really surprise Danny.  Bow guy sort of had to be competent.  Otherwise, no way would they let him go around with a bow.  Like, seriously.  A bow. 

Even so, bow guy was fighting an alien and—

“You have heart,” said the alien, raising the spear. 

Danny pushed bow guy out of the way, and his mind fuzzed out. 

(The human part of it, anyway.)

.

Loki didn’t know what a child was doing here, and he didn’t particularly care.  The boy would do for a hostage, at least.  He had a mission he had to fulfil, or else…

Or else. 

“Please don’t,” he said turning with a shadow of his usual lazy affect, vaguely insulted that the human thought he could be sneaker that him, “I still need that.” 

The human went on and on, apparently burdened with the delusion that he was on the same level as Loki. 

Loki was burdened with other things.  A glorious purpose.  Glad tidings.  Freedom.  What could be better than freedom?

“A world free from what?” asked the human. 

“From freedom,” said Loki, and wasn’t that what he believed, now?  Wasn’t that what he’d been shown?  “Freedom is life’s great lie.”  He would know.  He was an excellent liar.  “Once you accept that, in your heart—” He batted away an arrow and tsked.  “Shield me, boy,” he demanded.  Had Thanos misrepresented the scepter’s powers?  Or was the boy merely—

A dome of green surrounded him and the boy, thrumming with magic the likes of which he had only seen once, in a tome thrice forbidden. 

“Oh,” said Loki, almost purring.  “You are interesting.  What are you?”

“Half human, half ghost,” replied the boy, tersely. 

Loki had never heard of such a creature.  No matter.  He’d be sure to make good use of him. 

“Grab the scientist,” he said, nodding at the balding man who had been with his brother when he’d fought the Destroyer in the desert. 

Loki wanted the archer.  He seemed interesting.  Useful. 

.

Fenton was under thrall.  Phantom knew what that felt like.  A hundred feet under red water, trying not to drown, whispers everywhere.  Pulling.  Pushing.  Prodding. 

This was different, but the principle was the same. 

Neither half of him could truly ‘fight’ the other.  Fenton and Phantom were a single entity.  Not two in lockstep.  Even so. 

Fenton grabbed onto Dr. Selvig, as ordered.  Phantom made sure that was all they did. 

“What are you doing, boy?” snapped Loki.  “Follow me!  Bring the scientist.”

And so, they followed. 

.

Loki breathed.  Acquiring Barton had been the right choice.  The boy was powerful, but, perhaps because of his unique biology, did not have Barton’s presence of mind, and couldn’t have led him to such wonderful allies. 

Allies. 

These weren’t truly his allies.  Nor were they subjects.  They were…

Loki forced himself to breathe.  He just had to follow the mission.  Follow the mission, let Thanos’s army through.  He’d been promised this world.  He would have this world. 

And then he could be…  His mind stuttered over the next word, and he shook his head, trying to drive out the painful buzz of Thanos’s herald and mouthpiece trying to contact him. 

He looked up at the drones bustling around, all according to his will.  Except the boy, who stared at him, somehow managing to be both utterly blank and challenging at the same time. 

He was alone, here. 

He was alone. 

But what did it matter?  Bad men always wound up alone, and Loki… Loki could never be a good man. 

Chapter Text

Danny watched the alien – Loki, he called himself – carefully. 

As much as Danny knew what mind control felt like from the inside, he was even more experienced in detecting it from the outside.  He had met Spectra long before Freakshow.  Walker’s invasion had been a lesson in paranoia. 

Whatever else Loki was, he wasn’t in control, and he hadn’t been for a long time.

In theory, that put them in the same boat, on the same side.  That is, the side against whatever person or force was pulling their puppet strings.  In practice…

Well.  Danny had met Dora, too, and as far as he knew, her brother hadn’t needed mind control after everything else. 

He pushed up against the boundaries he had been set inside, trying to get a feel for them, for what was allowed and what wasn’t.   As much as this was like Freakshow, it also wasn’t.  This had been designed with the living in mind, not the dead.  He needed to know what he had to work with. 

Danny looked outside himself, too.  Dr. Selvig, the archer, and the other SHEILD people who had been taken by Loki didn't act like Danny was.  They acted less like automatons and more like Loki had hijacked their loyalty, their passions, and harnessed them to his own aims. 

Danny could feel something like that in what was pressing against his own mind.  But that structure was too delicate, too… familiar to affect him, which left the more robust but rather crude method of direct control.  He’d follow Loki’s instructions to the letter unless Phantom pulled Fenton up short. 

Or if Danny let himself be affected, if he stopped resisting.  Which, obviously, he wasn’t going to do. 

He could figure out some way to play literal genie with Loki.  His experiences with Desiree should do him some good. 

“So,” said Loki, reclining as indolently as he could on the hard seats of the SHIELD vehicle, “your powers interest me.  Tell me about them.”  Despite his position,

“They’re ghost powers.”

Loki waited. 

He kept waiting. 

He frowned.  “And what can you do with them?”

“Ghost things.”  Apparently, questions counted as orders.  Good to know.  

“And what are ghost things?”

“Scaring people.”

“How?  Show me.”

Yeah.  There was no way Danny was making this easy for him. 

Danny launched an ectoblast at Loki’s face.  Next thing he knew, he was on the floor of the jeep, the staff pressing against the back of his neck.  Loki could move faster than expected. 

“You will not attack me again,” ordered Loki, his voice a hiss.  It barely sounded like he was speaking English. 

“Sir,” said the archer, “we need to get clean transport.  Fury will be tracking us.”

“Indeed,” said Loki, distracted from Danny for the moment.  “We will also need more soldiers for our cause.”

“Can you show them what you showed us?” asked the archer. 

“I…” said Loki, turning the scepter over in his hand.  He looked at it almost as if he was surprised it was there.  “I would like to hold that kind of revelation in reserve.”

“I know a few groups,” said the archer.  “Might be easier to convince them with a display of force, though.”  He looked at Danny, who hadn’t yet been allowed off the floor. 

“Hm, yes,” said Loki, also looking at Danny. 

Wow, awesome, amazing, Danny had always wanted to be dumb muscle for a wannabe alien overlord.  Great.  

(… the alien thing was still pretty cool, though.)

“I don’t suppose,” said Loki, turning to the archer, “that you know the boy’s capabilities.”

“Fury briefed me,” said the archer. 

Okay.  Fury told this guy all about him, too?  Well, then, screw Loki and Fury.  Danny didn’t even know the archer’s name, and the archer knew everything up to Danny’s new and rarely used telekinetic powers?  That just wasn’t right. 

At least it seemed that the archer only knew about Danny’s ghostly abilities, not his human ones, although he wasn’t sure how useful that would be.  It was, after all, Danny’s human half under control, and Danny couldn’t see his ability to pilot a space shuttle, play hours’ worth of video games, or turn his eyelids inside out saving the day. 

Obviously it wasn’t impossible (thanks again, Freakshow, Technus, and Youngblood), but it didn’t seem very likely.

Danny watched passively as the archer, Dr. Selvig, and Loki started to make plans.  There wasn’t anything else he could do.

Being mind controlled was really boring.  Even when the one mind controlling him was from outer space. 

Come to think of it, wasn’t it really weird that Loki looked human?  Where humanoid aliens common?  What was Loki’s planet like?

.

So.   Danny might have zoned out a little.  In his defense, he’d spent a fair amount of time training himself to zone out during road trips.  It was a thing. 

When he zoned back in, Loki was ordering him to hijack a car.

His exact words?  “Go get me that car.”

Danny happily walked over to the car, even as the archer stalked over to another, weapon raised.  Danny gently phased the (shaking, terrified) driver out and picked up the car before turning back to face Loki. 

Hm.  Danny could hit Loki, but then the car would also hit the other mind-controlled agents standing next to Loki, so…  Danny tossed the car so that it landed behind them, on the SHEILD Jeep, crushing both vehicles into uselessness.

Loki gazed at him appraisingly, and Danny wondered if he hadn’t just made a mistake. 

.

They got in the car the archer had stolen and drove to what the archer called a ‘safe house.’  They stayed there for a while.  When they left, they had twice as many people and four times as many cars. 

The new people made Danny’s hair stand on end.  He didn’t like them. 

Their next destination was a tiny airstrip, and they loaded themselves – and far too many guns – onto a small plane.  Being trapped on a plane was even more boring than the car.  He couldn’t even eavesdrop on the conversations because no one had given him a pair of headphones and it was too loud in the plane otherwise.

It hurt his ears.  He wanted to curl up on himself.  But, of course, all he could do was stare blankly. 

He didn’t know where they were when they landed, but when they did, they were met by even more disturbing and armed to the teeth men and women. 

Loki started to talk about business deals – that’s all Danny could catch after the beating his ears had taken – but the situation devolved rapidly into violence, both sides shooting. 

Danny… stood still and did nothing.  He had not, after all, been told to do anything.  For a moment, he panicked internally, because gun battles weren’t places he wanted to be while human, but then he made the not at all disturbing discovery that, when his brain was disconnected, intangibility was reflexive. 

(Okay, it was actually massively disturbing, but Danny was mostly just glad that he wasn’t bleeding out from a bullet hole in his gut.)

“Boy!” snapped Loki.  “To me!”  The alien waved his hand, and Danny felt something cold and almost-not-quite like the Ghost Zone wash through the area.

With a flare of light, the airport tarmac was filled with duplicates of Loki. 

“Defend me,” barked the real Loki. 

Danny obeyed.  That, at least, was going to be one order he couldn’t throw off at all.  Too simple.  Too short.  Too in line with what he was as Phantom.

They retreated into a hanger, both sides of the battle taking cover behind or underneath planes and maintenance equipment.

“Take them down!” ordered Loki, pointing. 

Well.  English was a funny language.  ‘Them’ could refer to oh so many things.  Planes for example.  Or walls.  Roofs, even. 

He spread his arms and sent ectoplasm flying in all directions.

.

“Were you trying to kill me?” roared Loki, hand resting on, but not yet constricting around, Danny’s throat.  The battle was well and truly over, but only just.  Dust sifted from Loki’s hair and shoulders.

“No,” said Danny, honestly.  Case in point: Loki was still alive.

Loki barred his teeth.  There was a surprising amount of humor in the expression.  “Oh, you think you’re clever, don’t you, little ghost?”

“Not usually,” said Danny. 

“Ha!  Well, I’ve been thinking about how to bring you to heel since you tried that stunt with the car. Let’s see if we can’t make a leash for you, hm?”

.

Danny exhausted and pulled apart.  Fenton wanting to go one way under the pull of the scepter, Phantom steadfastly refusing to budge.  Loki could ask questions.  More importantly, he could make an entire Fortune 500 company’s worth of elite lawyers cry. 

Maybe he should have waited to act out, played at obedience until he could do something, until he could figure out how to escape.  Too late for that now. 

“To summarize,” said Loki, “you will stay at my side.  You will not harm me, either through action or inaction.  If I am in danger, you will protect me.  You will not create situations in which I will be harmed.  Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Danny, hating the word as it forced its way past his lips. 

“Good,” said Loki. 

.

They had a base, now. 

Danny wasn’t sure who it had belonged to originally, but now it was Loki’s.  They’d had to fight for it.  Danny hoped that when the SHIELD agents woke up, they didn’t remember what they’d done. 

There was a lab in the base, a pretty good one, too, if Danny was any judge.  Dr. Selvig’s delight upon seeing it made Danny nervous. 

Everyone else was running around, putting things together, setting things up.  Danny was standing next to Loki, as was becoming usual. 

Loki, meanwhile, was…  Meditating?  Sleeping?  Did Loki’s type of alien even need sleep?  Judging by the way he’d been making everyone work, sleep was a foreign concept to him, regardless. 

Something felt wrong. 

Yes, yes, he was being mind controlled by a megalomaniac alien.  Of course something felt wrong. 

This was something different.  Something… 

Loki began to twitch, his breath coming faster.  That scream of wrongness peaked and Danny reached out, grasping Loki’s shoulder, letting his hand phase in just a little bit, just enough to brush against Loki’s mind and—

Loki gasped.  “You!” he said, his eyes finding Danny’s.  “You—What—Why?”  His eyes went narrow and sharp with the last word. 

“You were in danger,” said Danny, neutrally. 

Loki regarded him for a long moment.  Danny could tell they were both disturbed.  Whatever had just happened was not right.  Was that related to whoever was controlling Loki?

“Very well,” said Loki.  He stood up.  “Come with me,” he said.  “We have much to do.”

Chapter Text

Normally, Tony would have blown off Fury's "briefing." 

After years of being Iron Man, he had a system.  He knew how to track stuff.  Weapons, combatants, refugees, radiation, snowstorms, you name it, he could find it.  None of his current tools were built or calibrated for what the tesseract gave off, but with Dr. Banner's papers, he could fix that within a week. 

He didn't have anything personal against ol' stars and stripes, and he was a fan of Dr. Banner's work.  His issue was with SHIELD.  More specifically, it was with blindly trusting a mysterious shadow government. 

He'd been burned badly enough trusting his own company.  His desire to play that game again for infinitely higher stakes was just about nil, and since Fury and Romanoff's opening moves boiled down to lying to him about everything, he had a pretty good idea what would happen if he did. 

But these weren't normal circumstances. 

He landed on the deck of SHIELD’s major budget expense (seriously, where did they get the money for this?  Tony knew how much cutting-edge technology cost.  He was cutting-edge technology) with a metallic clang.  Let a bunch of Fury’s goons pick him up in a small, military vehicle?  Where he’d ride in the back?  And some nerd would probably ask for his photo and throw up a peace sign?  Haha.  Yeah.  No. 

“Dr. Banner!” he called, stepping out of his armor and cuing it to retract into its briefcase form.  “It’s great to meet you.”  He closed the distance.  “Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled.  Also, I’m a huge fan of how you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

“Uh.  Thanks?”

Tony glanced at the other man.  “Captain.”

The one and only Captain America crossed his arms.  “Stark.  Fury didn’t tell me he was calling you in.”

“Yeah, that’s about par for the course for these guys.”

“No hello for me?” asked the massive pain in Tony’s neck. 

“I save my greetings for people I actually want to see.”

Romanoff rolled her eyes.  “Well, then.  Gentlemen, you might want to step inside, it’s going to get a little hard to breathe.  Tony, feel free to stay.”

Rodgers peered over the side, at the ocean.  “What, is this a submarine?”

“Nope,” said Tony.

“Then what would it—Oh, no,” said Banner.  They steadied themselves as the helicarrier lifted from the water.  “This is much worse than a submarine.”

“You’ve got to love the safety procedures, too,” said Tony, cheerfully.  “Not even a takeoff alarm, huh?”

.

Sadly, Tony didn’t get much time to bond with Dr. Banner (short, smart people had to stick together) before he was whisked away to the lab.  At this, he was again tempted to ditch Fury.  He was confident his help would make the search go faster, even if most of his help would be from the engineering and programming side of things, Banner really was brilliant, and Tony’s late-night reading could only do so much—

Point being, Tony didn’t ditch. 

“So, hit us with it, Fury,” he said, throwing himself into the nearest spinny chair.  Given that this was also the chair at the head of the table, it might have been meant for Fury, but Tony didn’t really care. 

“Please,” said Fury, voice dripping with sarcasm, “take a seat.”  He picked a remote up off the table.  “Two days ago, a SHIELD research facility was attacked by this man.”  A picture of a black-haired man appeared on the screen.  “Goes by the name of Loki.”

“Wait,” said Rodgers, “man?  Singular?  Is he enhanced?”

“Yes to the singular,” said Fury.  “No to the enhancement.  He’s an alien.”

“What, like from space?  Or from Mexico?  Because I never bought into the whole—”

Fury sighed.  “Yes, like from space.  He also attacked a small town in New Mexico two years ago.”

“Sweet.  And what did he want?”

“The Tesseract.”  Fury flicked to the next slide of the screen to show a glowing blue cube.  “It’s also how he reached the facility.  The Tesseract is—”

“A door to the other side of space, yeah, yeah, been there, heard that,” said Tony.  “I’m sure capsicle here knows all about it.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” said Rodgers, “but I’m not surprised the weapon of mass destruction cube is of interest to an evil alien.”

“Oh,” said Tony, “he has a sense of humor.”

“Boys,” said Romanoff. 

“Dr. Banner is working on finding the Tesseract,” said Fury.  “The problem is what to do when we find it.  Along with the cube, Loki took several of our people.”  The screen flicked to several portraits.  “He seems to have some kind of mind control capability related to his main weapon, which can also produce several other effects.”  A small video clip of the black-haired man blasting things with energy played.  “Using this, he—”

“Wait,” said Rodgers, “was that a child on the last screen?”

“Sure was, boy scout,” said Tony.  “Daniel Fenton, right?  Listed as being taken right next to Selvig, Barton, and all your super spy guys in that packet.  Only one of them with a social media presence.  Real easy to look up, right next to his ghost hunter parents.  You want to tell us about him?”

“Just to clarify,” said Rodgers, leaning forward.  “This is an actual minor we’re talking about.  He doesn’t just look like a kid?” 

Tony turned.  “Really?”

“Look, the future is weird.  I don’t know what to expect.”

“The Fentons,” said Fury, “were brought in as consultants.  They have experience with interdimensional portals.  Daniel Fenton in particular has experience with portal travel.”  He flicked rapidly through several slides until he landed on one that showed pictures of Daniel Fenton alongside a figure with white hair.  “He is also enhanced.  Lab accident, like Dr. Banner.”  He went to the next slide, which started playing videos of the boy wielding green energy against various monstrous creatures.  “Although he has taken some effort to conceal his abilities from others, including his parents.  We took that into account when we brought him in to consult.”

“Why did you bring him in to consult?” asked Tony.  “You expecting him to fight things for you?”

“We brought him in,” said Fury, tensely, “because the Tesseract was behaving oddly.  We had no—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Tony, raising both hands, “you’re telling us that when you invited the twelve-year-old—”

“He’s fifteen,” corrected Fury. 

“—the prepubescent interdimensional portal expert to your super-duper top secret interdimensional space portal lab to ‘consult’ with you on your malfunctioning interdimensional space portal, you had no idea that the space portal was going to act like a space portal.”  Tony spread his arms in a dramatic shrug.  “I’m not going to lie and say I’d never get a kid involved in my nonsense, I’m irresponsible like that, but at least I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t know what I was doing.  Just saying.”

“You’re just upset that he was called in to consult before you,” said Romanoff. 

“You’re missing the important part of this,” said Fury.  “The boy’s powers—”

“Actually,” said Rodgers, pointing across the table, “I’m with Stark on this one.”

“Oh,” said Tony, spinning his chair, “that’s nice.  Is this bonding?  Are we bonding?”

“Are you done?” snapped Fury.  “Daniel Fenton is a living weapon of mass destruction.  That’s before getting into Barton’s skill set and Loki’s apparent capabilities.   We’re unsure if Loki knows what he has.  From his actions at the facility, he seems to have been after the Tesseract.  But Fenton’s presence changes things.”

“My God, you’re really hollow under there, aren’t you?  No remorse about getting a child kidnapped?  Just ‘oh no, he’s a national security threat.’”  He spun his chair to face Romanoff and Rodgers.  “Who wants to be that when he says they took the kid’s secrets into account, he actually means blackmail?  Do his parents know what happened to him?”

“The Fentons have provided us with several weapon prototypes and capture devices intended to be used on the extradimensional entities they refer to as ghosts.  These devices should work on Daniel Fenton as well.  Don’t,” said Fury, cutting off Tony, “underestimate him because of his age.”

There was a small beep.  “Director Fury, sir, the Fentons say they’ve recorded a blip.  It’s in Germany.”

“Well, gentlemen.  I think it’s time for you to suit up.”

Chapter Text

As much as Loki would have liked to simply order Barton and his men to go after their delightful exchange vis a vis the eyeball, a little more discussion was needed.  Logistics.  Timing.  How, exactly, the eyeball would be attained.  A slight tangent to discuss why humans had felt the need to develop a device that would create a holographic model of an eyeball by slowly boring it out of someone’s head.  Casualty estimates.  Follow up regarding what would come after. 

But then they wound back to the main point and who would need to kill whom, and Loki’s sense of the boy through the staff shifted. 

“I can help,” he said. 

“Pardon?” said Loki with something of a sneer.  This was the first time the boy had spoken to him of his own accord, the first time he was behaving as he should have, and yet—

(Perhaps the boy had seen, perhaps he had been enlightened, as Loki had, that there was no true freedom, no way out, that it was all falsehood upon falsehood, all life’s great lie.)

And yet Loki couldn’t help but feel as if this was all horribly wrong. 

“I can help,” repeated the boy, looking first at Loki, then Barton, eyes wide as if with curiosity.  “I know a better way to get the stuff you need.”

Barton folded his arms and leaned back on one foot.  It was a more aggressive position than it immediately appeared.  True, it made it harder for Barton to reach his bow, but that was far from the only weapon on him, and something with a shorter reach would serve him better at this range.

“Better?” asked Barton, skeptically. 

“Yeah.  I can just go get whatever you want,” said the boy.  “I can just phase through the walls.  That way you don’t have to stab some guy’s eyeball or get caught by SHIELD.”

“Hm,” said Loki, interested but also cautious.  “What do you mean by phase?”

The boy promptly waved his arm through a nearby wall. 

“That’s how you avoided all those bullets, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said the boy, with a shrug.  “I figure, this way you can be sneaky.”

“And what if I don’t want to be sneaky?” asked Loki, circling the boy.  “What if I want to be captured by SHIELD?  If that is the thing that will bring me to glorious victory?”

“I mean, you do you.  But a bloodless victory has always been more impressive to me.”  The boy shrugged in a way Loki could almost mistake a careless, if it wasn’t an affectation he had often put on himself. 

If there was one thing this affair could not be, it was bloodless.  Even if the boy was a total innocent, he had to know it. 

(Except the boy hadn’t seen what he had seen, that madness in worship of death in the form of balance, half of everything in ruins in service of a lie—)

(But no lie was so great as freedom.)

Loki leaned down to the boy’s level and smiled thinly.  “You say that as if there was a choice.  There is no conquest that is not birthed in blood.”

“Sometimes choices are illusory,” said the boy, “but usually that’s either because you already chose, or someone else is choosing for you.  Illusions aren’t lies, anyway.  Illusory is the right word, isn’t it?”

Loki pursed his lips as he leaned back and revised his estimate of the boy’s age downwards.  He knew humans didn’t live nearly as long as Asgardians – or Jotunn, for that matter.  Only centuries.  A small number of centuries, at that.  Five hundred or something like that.  He’d initially thought the boy was perhaps in his seventies or so, but really, even at that age Asgardians had a good grasp on the vocabulary of Asgardian, and they could barely walk.  Also, English wasn’t nearly as noble a tongue. 

“Oh?  And what would you choose?”

“Not to do this,” said the boy.

“Back to those non-answers, I see.  What would you do if you had to?”

The boy tilted his head, considering, green guttering behind the glittering blue characteristic of Loki’s control, and once more—

He couldn’t help but—

There was power within the boy.  Power that Loki had barely been able to scratch the surface of.  Power, a will strong enough not to bend—

(Not as Loki’s had.)

“You’re making a portal, aren’t you?  For your army?  I would put it somewhere far away from where humans can easily get, so they can stop it easily and you can get as many of your forces through as possible.  Portals are bottlenecks.  That way, you can force a surrender.”

--and a sharp mind as well.  But, perhaps, not sharp enough. 

“But what of the great weapons of your world, boy?  Nuclear missiles, I believe?”

“A remote location would be too easy a target,” said Barton.

“The portal would close just from that?  Seems a bit flimsy.”

Loki chuckled.  “Perhaps not, but even my idiot brother would hesitate before testing his might against nuclear fission.”

“Oh, yeah.  I guess ground zero wouldn’t be pleasant.  Getting caught on purpose still seems like a big risk.”

Loki scoffed.  Of course it was a big risk!  But risk and reward went hand in hand.  The risk was the point—

But why was it the point?  He…

The boy watched him with bright eyes. 

“Why have you suddenly become so… cooperative?”

“Because I made a choice,” said the boy, “to help people if I could.  I can’t just let innocent people die or be hurt if I can stop it.”

“What is your name, boy?”

“Danny.”

“Danny, then.  Perhaps we should make a change in plans.”

.

The Fentons’ satellites (illegally launched from their Amity Park brownstone and wouldn’t Tony love to get his hands on whatever let them do it) had pinpointed the blip (Tony would also like to know what caused the blip, exactly, scientifically speaking; GHOSTS was not a satisfactory answer) to a research building in Stuttgart, Germany. 

Everything seemed peaceful. 

“Any ideas about what Loki might want here?” asked Tony over the radio as he made another lap of the building.  “Or, you know, any sign of Loki?” 

They couldn’t just break into the building to search it, and in a move Tony definitely sympathized with, the owners were denying the creepy, largely American intelligence organization access to their buildings and records. 

Fun. 

Natasha audibly sighed.  “Not—"

Tony’s speakers suddenly produced a loud blaat.

“What was that?” asked Rogers. 

“The Fentons’… thing,” said Romanoff.  “Tony, if I’m reading this right, there’s something coming past the wall just below you.”

“Roger that,” said Tony, scanning the area with every available sensor.

He needn’t have bothered.  The kid, Daniel Fenton, walked into plain sight, holding a briefcase, wearing Kevlar and combat boots over his pajamas, the works. 

Tony was about to call down to him – sprout some quip about bedtimes – before jumping off the roof he was watching from, but the kid stopped and looked directly at him. 

“I know I’m out past curfew,” he said, “but can’t you overlook it just this once?”

“No can do,” said Tony, “where’s Loki and what’s in the case?”

“Around, and iridium.”

“Huh.  Didn’t expect you to answer that, honestly.  This going to turn into a fight?”

“That’s up to you more than me.”

“Stark,” said Rogers over his earpiece, “I’m on my way.  Keep him talking.”

“So am I,” said Romanoff.  “Called in the rest of our backup.”

Like Tony couldn’t handle a teenager, no matter how many powers he had.

“Takes two to tango, kiddo.  So why are you answering?  Seems like the kind of thing Macbeth’s understudy would want to avoid.”

“I’ve got instructions.  Right now, they’re to retrieve the iridium and protect Loki.” 

“Nothing about talking, huh?  Sticking it to your boss?  I can respect that.”

“More like taking a broad interpretation of my orders.”  Daniel Fenton twisted to look behind him, and there was something subtly off about the movement, but he didn’t have time to process it before Fenton was looking straight at him again.  “Sorry, time for me to go.  I don’t like crowds.”

He vanished. 

“Jarvis!”

“Tracking, sir,” said the cool voice of his AI aide.  “Slight temperature anomalies detected—”

Tony didn’t bother listening to the rest, instead focusing on the targeting circle on his UI.  “Stunners!”

The stunners deployed, the targeting circle disappeared, and Tony felt all the servos on right side of his suit freeze. 

“Really?  Not even a Spector Deflector to protect your important stuff?” said a voice – Fenton’s voice – behind him.  “You need to do better.”  Something dropped to the ground behind him.  “I mean, my friend basically worships the ground you walk on.  This is just embarrassing.”

“Jarvis?”

“He seems to have pulled out several power relay nodes, sir, although I’m not sure how.  All of the surrounding equipment seem to be undamaged.”

“Backups?”

“As I said, sir, several.”

.

Danny had not actually tried all that hard to be sneaky with his powers.  The opposite, in fact.  He could have gotten in and out with minor touches of invisibility and intangibility.  He didn’t need to push it and wind up on his parents’ satellites. 

Except, he wanted to.  Needed to. 

Giving in, even a little bit, to the staff’s power had been… bad.  Like ripping the scab off of a barely closed wound and pouring in some salt for good measure.  But he couldn’t just stand by and let people be killed when he could do something about it. 

He’d also confirmed that Loki had no real desire to win this little war.  Either that, or he was woefully uninformed about the willingness of humans to bomb population centers in pursuit of a ‘greater good.’

Okay, probably both, actually.  Mostly the former, though, which is what Danny needed.

Loki didn’t want to win.  He wanted to make SHIELD—No.  He wanted to make Earth mad enough to come at him with everything they had.  He wanted to lose spectacularly, to crash and burn so fiercely in defeat that he’d burn the hand of whoever was pulling his strings.  He wanted to break their army in a charge against siege walls they wouldn’t even know were there, damn the casualties on both sides.

But at the same time, he wasn’t allowed to want anything but domination. 

(Danny wondered if Loki’s master was like Freakshow, forcing him to play act a shallow caricature of himself.)

(Ghosts don’t have friends.)

(Life’s great lie.)

Protection wasn’t the core of what he was, wasn’t his Obsession, but it was close enough that Danny had learned all sorts of different tricks for it.  Maybe Loki expected that, with the orders he’d handed out.  Maybe not.  Danny couldn’t exactly ask, any more than he could ask Dr. Selvig why he’d build a pretty obvious off button into the design of a portal that was never supposed to be closed. 

The point was, Danny had gotten SHIELD’s attention.  And they’d sent two bona-fide superheroes and a small army after him. 

It wouldn’t be enough.  Even if all of them had been armed with ghost tech.  They weren’t. 

Really.  Danny had expected better of Iron Man.  Hopefully, he’d get his hint…

Danny tracked the tiny firefly ectosignatures of several blasters and a Fenton Finder as they approached him.  No GIW or Dalv tech in his range.  Danny would have thought they’d go for that first. 

The problem with Fenton tech was, well… 

Danny was the reason any of it worked in the first place. 

Feeling surprisingly clear and confident, even though this was the first time he’d done anything of the sort, Danny reached out and removed the spark that made his parents’ technology function.  The ectosignatures died abruptly. 

That left mundane weapons and—

Something sang as it flew through the air at his chest.  He dodged on instinct, some part of him knowing that intangibility wouldn’t work very well in this particular case. 

(As traumatizing as mind control was, it did seem to have some fringe benefits.)

The shield bounced back into the hands of none other than Captain America.

So.  That would be superhero number two. 

“C’mon, son, we don’t have to do this.  Put the case down and come with us.”

“Again, more up to you than me,” said Danny.  He was going to say more, but the prongs of a stun gun sailed through him.  He looked up at the red-headed SHIELD agent that had just shot him.  “Rude.”

“He’s under mind control,” said the woman.  “He’s not going to listen to reason.”

Captain America made a face, but charged Danny with his shield in front as the woman lined up another shot. 

“I listened to reason last time.”  ‘Reason’ in this case being ‘oh my gosh, one of my best friends is falling to her death,’ but Danny thought it counted.  An alien invasion was unlikely to be conducive to his friends’ health, after all. 

Captain America hit Danny, but Danny held his ground, his feet only sliding a little bit before he found purchase. 

“Hey!” he shouted over Captain America’s unreasonably loud shield.  “You’re enhanced, right?  What’s the highest fall you’ve ever survived?”

“What?”

Danny figured that was about as good an answer as he was going to get, so he picked up the captain by the shield and flung him in the direction of the river.  It was a number of streets away, but Danny was sure he’d be fine.  It was a water landing, anyway. 

The woman had retreated to stand back with the other agents.  Danny braced himself for what he knew was coming next.  “Fire!”

Well.  This was boring. 

He could just run, but…

Honestly, they needed to be more scared of him.  Not just for Loki’s plan, or his plan, either.  He was a ghost!  Being feared was part of the package!

With a flick of his fingers, all the agents were knocked back with a wave of ectoplasm.  Now it was time for him to disappear mysteriously. 

Chapter Text

Steve fell from heights with some frequency.  Gravity was an old and persistent enemy of his, older than his enhancement, older than his time at bootcamp, older than the time he’d broken both arms falling off a see-saw.  This was, however, his first time being thrown this far by a person. 

The throw was fairly shallow, high enough to get him over the trees and a couple streets.  The vertical vector wouldn’t be much of a problem, falling a couple of stories wasn’t something that really bothered him.  It was the horizontal component that was worrisome. 

Fenton, it seemed, had one hell of a pitch. 

He hit water – the Neckar River – shield-first and skipped.  The vibranium dampened the impact, which, yes, it had no business doing.  Steve had spent some time in physics classrooms, thank you very much.  Vibranium was the next best thing to outright magic. 

He sent up a plume of water, then skipped like a stone, his stomach doing flips as he was once again, however briefly, airborne. 

He hit the water again and seemed to skid several more feet before friction brought him to a stop and he began to sink.  Luckily, his skillset included swimming.

Lightning cleaved the sky above, a deafening boom of thunder right on his heels. 

.

Loki hissed through his teeth.  The sky churned with his brother’s – No.  With Thor’s ire and Odin’s magic.  He had factored Thor into his earlier plans, the plans that included his capture, but with a new strategy in mind, Thor’s early arrival was nothing but inconvenient. 

A smaller hand slipped into his, and Loki felt magic not his own wash over him.  His first instinct was to lash out at it, push it off, free himself, but he recognized it’s character. 

“Invisibility?” he asked, looking down at Danny. 

“I can’t hold it forever.  I’ve got the iridium.  Where’s Barton?”

“The archer can take care of himself,” said Loki, leading the way with long strides.  “Are you going to revert to your previous state now that you got what you wanted?”

“I don’t think I can.  That staff seems to prevent me from taking actions that would reduce its hold on me.  I assume that is why none of us have slept?”

Loki didn’t deign to answer.  His mind was occupied by other things.  Such as how much power Danny was holding back.  In contact like this, Loki could feel it, its weight tangible and looming, cold and dark.  Not entirely unlike his own internal well of power, if he thought about it.  Similar enough to the Casket of Ancient Winters to make Loki…  Not homesick.  Not exactly.  Nostalgic, perhaps. 

So much power in one so easily controlled.  In one so hesitant to use it.

Loki didn’t know what to make of him. 

He wondered what Thanos would…

No.  Loki knew what Thanos would do if the child fell into his hands.  Another…  Another lesson.  Another tool.  Another weapon.  The latter two were, after all, what Loki was using him for. 

It was a good thing that Thanos only wanted the Tesseract.  After Loki returned that and the scepter, the Earth, and every being on it, would be his.

“I’ve been wondering something,” said Danny.  “Your army is a loaner, right?  They aren’t your people.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’ve been calling them ‘the Chitauri’ when you talk about them to Barton, and you don’t say ‘we’ when you’re talking about them.  Maybe your language doesn’t work like that, but you’re pretty good at English, so…”

“I don’t speak English,” said Loki.  “The language I am using is All Speech.  Your mind is only interpreting it as English.”

“Oh, huh.  Does that mean you can’t read English, or…?”

“Practitioners of All Speech can understand all languages, written or spoken.”

“What about sign language?”

“That as well.”

“Cool,” said Danny.  “But what I was saying was, how are you going to keep control when the Chitauri aren’t with you anymore?”

Loki stopped and whirled, yanking his hand away.  Not with him anymore?  He—That—They were Thanos’s creatures, and—

The child might have a poi—

Lightning struck. 

.

The lightning guy was a surprise.  Danny was just going to say it.  He had approximately zero (that was a 0, a goose egg, none) plans for dealing with a lightning guy.  Especially since he wasn’t a fan of large amounts of electricity. 

Lightning guy, on the other hand, had no problem with picking up Loki and flying away. 

Great.  Wonderful.  Perfect.  Lovely.  How was he supposed to catch up to that without going ghost?

An arrow flew overhead.  Danny turned to see Barton running up behind him. 

“You’re faster than I am,” he said, holding out a small, square device.  “This is a tracker.  I’ll take the iridium.”

“Okay,” said Danny, making the trade.  “Good luck.”

Barton nodded.  Danny ran. 

.

Tony Stark wasn’t a genius for nothing.  His suits had emergency backups.  Not very good ones, space was a premium in a design like this, but enough to get moving again once they kicked in. 

“—if you can fish him out before any locals investigate.”  Romanoff said to her earpiece. “What happened to your suit?”

“What happened to those fancy weapons you had?” asked Tony, kneeling to pick up the tangle of wires whose removal had, however briefly, turned him into an expensive, handsome, and inconveniently large paperweight.

“They all stopped working,” said Romanoff. 

“What, the kid snuck by you and pulled wires out of all of them?”

“We had eyes on him when they deactivated.  All at the same time.”

“Think the parents had some failsafe?”

Before Romanoff could answer, a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder took their attention. 

“Crap,” she said.  “Thor.”

“Loki’s brother?”

She put her hand to her earpiece, and Tony realized that his comms must be acting up, too, because no one pinged him. 

“We have eyes on him and Loki.  Get Rogers and everyone get ready to move out.  We might not get another chance.  You still okay to fight.”

“I highly recommend against it, sir,” said Jarvis. 

“Sure,” said Tony.  “Mind if I catch a ride?”

.

“Where is the Tesseract?”

Loki gasped in mock hurt before laughing, using a nearby tree as a prop to ‘stabilize’ himself.  “I missed you, too!”  His words echoed back oddly off the mountains around them, despite the continuing storm.

“Do I look to be in a gaming mood?”

“You should be thanking me!  I know about your oath of protection, but how much does it mean when you’re holed away in Asgard?”

“I thought you dead, Loki?”

“And did you mourn?” asked Loki, curious of the answer despite… everything. 

Perhaps curiosity was too mild a term.  There was too much desperation in it.  Too much hunger.

“We all did.  Our father—”

“Your father,” snapped Loki.  “You saw what I did with the casket.”

“We were raised together.  We played together.  We fought together.  Do you remember none of that?  We are brothers.”

Loki did remember.  The problem was, he remembered both what Thor was describing, and another, darker version of events, like holograms played over one another.  And he knew how prone his ‘brother’ was to seeing only what he wanted to see. 

“Please,” said Loki, “maybe that’s what was going on in your mind, but let me assure you, you were the only one who thought of us that way.”  He sneered, pushing past Thor to stand at the edge of the cliff.  “And then, even you tossed me into an abyss!  I, who was and should be king!”

“So, you take your anger at Asgard out on the Earth?  When you know it is under my protection?”

“These humans will be slaughtered in droves,” snarled Loki.  “I will bring decimation down upon them, whereas he—”

Thor leveled Mjolnir at Loki’s chest.  “You will do no such thing.  You will give up the Tesseract and come home.   Give up this—”

Danny materialized between Thor and Loki. 

“You know,” he said, “he’s being mind-controlled, too.”

He pushed Loki off the cliff, and they fell.

Chapter Text

"You idiot!  He can fly!"

Well, so could Danny!  Usually.  When he wasn't limited to human form because he was being mind-controlled and the mind control didn't want him to go ghost because it would have to let go. 

Luckily, Danny could slow down their fall, and Danny’s plan didn’t require distance, just breaking the man’s line of sight. 

He turned them both invisible, and when they crashed into the trees below, it didn’t hurt much. 

Loki got the idea quickly enough.  Soon, there were illusions, perfect images of Danny and Loki, running through the trees below.  Thor zoomed after them, and with a muffled scoff, flicked his fingers, splitting the illusion. 

Danny had to admit that was pretty cool. 

“Why,” said Loki, voice low and angry, “did you tell him I was mind-controlled?  I am not under any mind control.”

Could have fooled Danny.   “You told me to protect you.  He seemed to care about you.  If he thinks you’re being controlled, he’ll hesitate.”

“Care about me?  Maybe he cares about the brother he thought he had, but he never knew me.”

.

“I’ve got eyes on—” Romanoff broke off.  “There’s more than one.”

“Fenton’s duplication ability?” asked Rogers, who was still dripping on the floor. 

“Only if he can pass it to Loki, too.”

“We’ll have to split up,” said Rogers.  “Each of us take one.”

“I’ve got the one in the middle,” said Tony. 

.

“And here come the heroes,” said Loki.  “Shall we see if I can get them to fight?”

.

They’d whittled down the Lokis to one, and Romanoff had finally managed to tag Fenton with a sleeper dart.  Problem was, Thor didn’t want to let his brother go without a fight. 

A fight there was.  It started out okay, at least in Tony’s opinion.  Neither he nor Rogers were exactly fresh and Thor was a godlike alien warrior with a magic lightning hammer, but they held their own. 

Up until Thor overloaded his circuits, leaving the right side of his suit a smoking, unresponsive mess.  Being that he didn’t want to become Perillaus Mark 2 inside his own brazen bull, he pulled the emergency release.  Not all the catches worked, and he had to kick off one of his boots before it could cripple him. 

This left him a normal, undefended human in the middle of a battle between Captain America and Thor.  Not his idea of a vacation. 

Not that he didn’t feel as if he could overcome even this challenge, but valor, discretion, etcetera, etcetera, it was time to get out of—

He was stopped by a spear tip to the chest.  The arc reactor in particular.  Oh, and a smiling Loki. 

Not good, not good—

Loki frowned.  “Why isn’t it working?”

“Uh,” said Tony.  “Compatibility issues?”  Then he remembered the two legendary figures duking it out behind him.  “Help!”

Loki, annoyingly, disappeared. 

.

“I thought we were trying not to get caught,” hissed Danny. 

“Having the smith under my command would have been a boon,” shot back Loki.  “The benefits outweighed the risks.  Why didn’t it work?”

“Might have something to do with the giant glowy thing on his chest,” said Danny.  Tucker would kill him for forgetting the name.  “The arc reactor?  Does something for his heart problems.”

Loki looked like he had swallowed a lemon.  “No matter.  We still have the upper hand.”

.

We, Loki had said. 

It wasn’t exactly a slip of the tongue.  He was simply… surprised at the word’s honesty.  He didn’t think he had it in him, to be honest. 

No, that wasn’t right.  For all his lies, he was more honest about the truths of the world than anyone else. 

He dismissed the thought to focus on his current… predicament. 

Running through the woods like this, plan or no, was undignified.  He was half tempted to tell Danny to leave him to be captured and tell Barton to go through with the previous plan.  They were disgustingly far from the rendezvous. 

Disgustingly, because although Loki would prefer to ignore it, he was on a time limit.  His unconventionally acquired followers were not automatons.  Their bodies would force them to sleep eventually, and then what would Loki do?  He’d be left in a situation not unlike the one Danny outlined regarding the Chitauri. 

The new plan should give him time to overcome that particular problem. 

The reached the road, and Loki shot a warning blast in front of the next car to drive by, forcing it to stop. 

“Sorry,” said Danny as he pulled the driver out through the door, and then…  Went around to the side without the wheel. 

“What are you doing?”

“Getting in the passenger seat?”

“You expect me to drive?”

“You are the adult.  I can’t get a license in my state until I’m sixteen.”

“Sixteen decades?” asked Loki.  Who had come up with such a ridiculous number?

“Uh, no.  Years.  Sixteen years.”

“As in, rotations around your sun?”

“That is how we define years, yes.”

“How,” said Loki, “old are you?”

“Fifteen.  Do we really have to have this conversation now?”

“And what is the average lifespan of a human?”

“I don’t know, man.  Eighty?  The oldest person I’ve ever met was only, like, a hundred.”

Loki did not blanch.  Truly.  He stalked to the driver’s side door and pulled it open.  Operating a mortal vehicle couldn’t be that hard.

.

Danny, having been raised by Jack and Maddie Fenton, did not see anything deficient in Loki’s driving skills.  However, it is important to note that anyone else in the same situation – save, perhaps, Jazz Fenton or Thor – certainly would have. 

.

“So,” said Fury.  “You let them get away.”

“I think,” said Tony, testing out exactly how pulled the muscle in his right shoulder was, “that ‘let’ is a bit of a strong word, there.  Why didn’t those fancy ray guns work?”

“At this time, that’s unclear,” said Fury. 

“Could it be sabotage?” asked Romanoff.  “The Fentons may know more than they’re letting on.”

“Again, we’re looking into it.  What is clear is that you underestimated the enemy.”

“Well, sorry for not wanting to use lethal force on a teenager.  Now, if it was reindeer games—”

“I do not believe my brother is entirely in his right mind.  The boy with him—”

“Even ignoring the fact that Fenton has been compromised by Loki’s mental abilities,” interrupted Fury, “are you trying to say that what he did in New Mexico was, what, some kind of fluke?”

“In New Mexico,” said Thor, “Loki was only after me.  He didn’t kill anyone.”

“Not for lack of trying,” said Agent Coulson from where he was lurking in the back of the room.  Cool.  Tony had no idea how long he’d been doing that. 

“I think he was trying to give us hints,” said Tony.  “Fenton, I mean.”

“Like what?” asked Rogers.

“Said his friend was a fan of mine and that I could do better, whatever that meant.  Didn’t he say something about your shield, too?  Something about it being loud?”

“He did,” said Rogers.  “But we have no idea how the victims here are being affected.  It might not mean anything.”

“Yeah?  And how about the fact that we’re all still alive?  He pulled circuits out of my suit without touching anything around it.  He could have yanked out the arc reactor.  You know, the thing that is very publicly the only thing keeping my heart beating.  Hell, he could have pulled out our hearts with that little stunt.  Yeah, we got knocked over, but at the end of the day, that’s all that happened.”

Fury stared at Tony for a long moment.  “Coulson,” he said.  “Get in contact with the Fentons.  See if you can learn anything about Daniel’s friends, and why the weapons they gave us failed.”

Chapter Text

It was early in the morning when she got the call.  Sixish.  The other numbers on the clock didn’t register to her.   

“Hey,” said Tucker, “guess what government agency I just hacked.”

Sam sat up, all traces of sleep gone.  Her hand curled around the wing of the nearest stuffed bat.  “You found him?”

“Sort of.  Ever hear of SHIELD?”

“No,” said Sam.  “Is it part of the GIW?”  Ever since the Fentons came back without Danny and locked themselves in Fentonworks, that had been her biggest fear.

“I found them through the GIW, but they seem to be partitioned pretty well, along with something called HYDRA…”

“What, like World War Two HYDRA?”

“You know them?”

“They were one of Hitler’s science divisions,” said Sam.  “They…  My great-grandparents were rescued from one of their camps by Captain America.”

Tucker paused.  “Funny you should mention Captain America,” he said, the words almost tumbling over each other.  “Because apparently, he works for SHIELD.  Or with SHIELD?  It’s a little unclear, actually.  I’m not sure he’s getting paid.”

“Focus, Tucker,” said Sam.  “How is Danny involved?”

“He’s been mind controlled by an evil clown.”

“What?  Freakshow?”

“No, this one’s green and Norse god themed.  Loki.  Has a scepter, too, though, which is a weird coincidence.  And he’s from space.”

“An evil green clown from outer space is mind controlling Danny?”  That was… an eclectic bundle of traits, even for them.  Like someone had thrown darts at a board of character concepts.  Or took Freakshow, swapped his palette and made him an alien. 

At least it wasn’t the GIW.

“And making him fight Iron Man and Captain America in…  Germany.  Stuttgart, Germany.  Oh, this is live.”

“You have eyes on him?”  She swung her feet over the side of her bed and reached for her laptop.

“Electronic ones, but yeah.  Gotta love the body cam trend.  I’m sending you the footage on a secure link, but I’ll have to delete it, after.  I don’t want to show up if they investiga—”

Sam, having just clicked on the link, swore.  “He’s human, Tucker.”

“Yep, I know.”

“He’s fighting them as a human.  That means they know who he is.”

“Yeah.”

Clearly, the problem with that wasn’t clicking for him.  “That means they know who we are.”

“Crap,” said Tucker.  “Plan?”

“Not much we can do to help Danny, but…  He didn’t hurt anyone in that fight.  Not seriously.”

“I think Captain America cleared thirty feet on that throw, so…”

“Captain America’s abilities are well documented.  He’ll live.  I think Danny is fighting this, or at least working around it.  We can’t trust SHIELD if they’re associated with the GIW and HYDRA, even a little bit, so…  We need to find out where they keep prisoners, in case they catch Danny, and figure out how to stay away from them.  They’re going to come looking for us eventually.”

There was a tapping sound from the other side of the line.  “Ghost weapons will only get us so far.”

“Yeah,” agreed Sam.  “Secret government agency versus two teens armed with weapons that only hurt dead people.  Three, if Jazz gets back soon.  Not much math there.” 

“Objection.  The Fenton Anti-Creep Stick can hurt a wide variety of people.”

“It’s just a baseball bat with the name Fenton painted on it in phase-proof paint.  Not much good against bullets.”  She knelt on the floor and reached under her bed.  After a moment of groping, she pulled out a thermos.  “I have an idea, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“Is it some variation of sneak over to Germany and hit Danny with the Fenton Anti-Creep Stick until he snaps out of it?”

“We don’t even know if that will work,” said Sam.  “It didn’t with Freakshow.”

“We couldn’t even hit him when he was with Freakshow.”

“You think that’s changed?  No.  Even if he can’t go ghost for some reason, he actually knows how to dodge now.  I was thinking about a trip to the museum.”

“You’re right, I don’t like it.”

“It’s the best weapon we have access to, and I trust you.”

“I don’t trust me.  Besides, do you really think that a second mind control scepter is the thing we need right now?”

“We need something.”

Tucker sighed.  “How are we even going to get it?  It’s in a museum.”

“I haven’t been able to empty the thermos since Danny’s parents came back.  It’s almost full.”

“Oh, no,” said Tucker. 

.

Releasing the Box Ghost (among other sundry minor animal and blob ghosts) into the museum caused a predictable amount of chaos, especially when the staff sprinted into back rooms and downstairs to protect the archives.  They still used boxes and crates for that, here.  Rookie move. 

“Come on,” said Sam, making sure her hoodie was on and her blaster was primed.  Tucker, with his PDA and ‘ghost noise’ generator, followed behind.  With all their precautions, they’d hopefully wouldn’t be identifiable on the security cameras. 

Duulaman’s Scarab Scepter sat in the display case in front of them.  She raised her blaster and fired.  The glass broke. 

“Are you sure about this?” asked Tucker, hand hovering in front of him. 

“Yeah, but we can try something else if you’re really worried about it.  You stopped yourself last time.  You controlled it.”

“Yeah,” said Tucker.  He swallowed.  “Okay.  I’ve got this.” 

He picked up the staff, and the museum dissolved in a whirl of sand.  They were standing on top of a dune, pyramids in the distance.  Tucker’s fingers looked bloodless from the stress of his grip. 

“Tucker,” said Sam, cautiously. 

“It’s okay,” said Tucker.  “I can do this.  Just.  Give me a second.”

The sand swirled again, and they were in Tucker’s bedroom.  He dropped the staff with a gasp.  A fine layer of sand drifted to the floor. 

“That was,” he said, “something.  I could.”  He covered his mouth with one hand.  “I could take us to Germany,” he said, voice harsher than usual. 

“We don’t know if Danny is still there,” said Sam. 

“R- Right,” said Tucker.  “I need to—I need to sit down.”

Mrs. Foley’s voice rose from downstairs.  “What agency did you say you worked with again, Mr. Coulson?”

Chapter Text

Between the mind control and the simple nature of what he was, the directive to protect Loki and keep him from harm wasn’t something Danny could shake off.  It honestly wasn’t something he wanted to shake off.  Not when it was such a wonderful tool for him to use. 

The key was being obnoxious and pedantic about what ‘protect’ and ‘situations in which I will be harmed’ meant. 

Not in the ‘I’m going to smother and nag you’ way, but in the ‘being closer to the guy mind controlling and possibly mentally torturing you is definitely harmful’ way. 

See, thing is, SHIELD had brought Danny on to consult because of his expertise with portals.  He knew what it took to make them.  He also knew how much it sucked to die because of a malfunctioning one, so there was a balance he had to keep, but still.  There were a vast number of barely detectable alterations to a portal design that would keep it from working at all.  The name of the game was sabotage. 

Not that he was the only one playing that game.

The construction of the iridium cylinder was laughable.  It was irregularly shaped and full of holes.  They were making the whole thing from scratch, so it wasn’t like they needed to make it a certain size or shape or anything like that.  It was just.  Bad on purpose. 

Then there was the actual formation method, which was to shoot an unprotected beam a hundred or so feet until the terminus.  No casing.  No parabolic focus – although that probably would have been difficult with only the Tesseract itself as a source.  No bounce-back.  No sizing options.  Just the Tesseract, the inducer, and the hope that catching bugs in the portal beam wouldn’t screw it up too much.  Not to mention atmospheric disturbances…

It was like the goal was to make the worst technically functional portal possible. 

Well, no.  Danny’s goal was to make it actually dysfunctional, but he had to follow Loki’s commands while doing that, so…

Speaking of Loki, although he was leaving most of the work to Dr. Selvig (aka the saboteur-in-chief), Danny got the impression that he had a greater understanding of portal physics than he let on.  Loki was being very hands-off, though, and he was being compelled to make the portal in the first place.

Add this all to the new plan being one that sounded good on paper but was almost certainly guaranteed to be a disaster of epic proportions, because none of the people who came up with it actually wanted it to succeed…

Anyway, it was all a mess. 

“We have a problem,” said Dr. Selvig. 

Excellent.

Danny looked over to Loki, only to see that, rather than obscurely pleased, he looked rather ill.  Actually, come to think of it, none of them looked well.  Side effect of not sleeping. 

… Had Danny seen Loki sleeping?  Or had he just been meditating slash getting-mentally-tortured-by-whoever-was-on-the-other-end-of-this?

He had to get a better name for that guy.  Chitauri’s boss?  Nah.  Didn’t seem to fit.  Chief Jerk?  Freakshow Mark 2? 

Could Danny get Loki out of this by making him sleep or knocking him out?  It didn’t seem impossible, and he could justify it with the whole ‘sleep is necessary for your health’ thing.  He put the thought to the side to focus on Dr. Selvig. 

“We don’t have enough power.  Our energy supply is too weak.”

“Not enough power?” snapped Loki.  “The Tesseract is nothing but power!”

Somehow, Danny got the impression that he already knew this.  That there was glee behind his anger, that there was joy for another crushed plan. 

“I know,” said Dr. Selvig, “I know.  But it’s like a nut.  You have to crack it open to get at the meat.”

“Where can we find the power we need?”

“Some nuclear plants.  Stark Tower,” said Dr. Selvig, and, oh. 

That was why Loki wanted to stage his invasion there in the original plan, before he’d been convinced otherwise.  It was a necessity thing.  Something he needed to do to please his master. 

New York was still a bad, bad idea, though.  Like – considering that they wanted the whole invasion thing to fail, centering it right on top of an ‘enemy’ fortress was a plus, yeah, so was luring the ‘heroes’ in quickly, and the people with their fingers on the nuclear buttons would probably not want to nuke NYC if at all possible, but…

So many people would die.  New York was dense and not at all prepared for an invasion of that kind or degree. 

In fact, there was only one place that was prepared to deal with an invasion through an interdimensional portal.

Everything that made Danny himself rebelled at the thought.  Amity Park was his, his haunt, his responsibility, his home, his to protect, his to defend.  He would not, could not lead an invasion there, mind control or not.  Not even for the sake of the rest of the Earth. 

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Loki with a raised eyebrow. 

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t slept for…”  He trailed off.  “Days?  Anyway, I know some people who might be able to help with the power problem.”

.

“Creepy spy guy downstairs.  What should we do?”

“Uh,” said Sam.  If this had been her house, she’d go downstairs and tell Tucker to run for the hills with the staff.  But it was his house, and the guy was looking for him… Probably.  Mrs. Foley hadn’t called them down yet. 

Because she thought they were out.  Right. 

“Out the window,” she said. 

Tucker pulled up the sash and yanked out the screen—Then backtracked for his go bag.  Sam shimmied out the window onto the ledge, then started lowering herself to the ground.  Tucker followed soon after, replacing the screen and closing the window behind him, keeping the staff tucked between his chin and his chest.  He reached the ground at almost the same time as Sam.

“Your place?”

“They might go there, too.  We should—”

“Hello, kids.”

The man in front of them looked more like someone’s dad than a spy, but…  He also looked a lot like a spy.  Like a dad spy.  But not necessarily a dad of spies.  Just a dad that was also a spy.  Though he could be a dad of spies, too, she supposed. 

This was off track. 

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to talk?”

Sam was experienced.  But she was used to fighting ghosts.  She didn’t really know how to spot hidden weapons. 

Still.  She was sure this guy had them.  

Whether or not the organization as a whole was willing to use weapons on kids was a question already answered.  They’d shot at Danny.  They worked with the GIW. 

And possibly literal Nazis. 

This guy was an unknown, but she sure wasn’t giving him the benefit of the doubt, dad face or not.  They’d have to treat him as if he would shoot. 

The question was if Tucker would be able to do anything about it first. 

The man raised his hands.  “Just a talk.  It looks like you know your friend is in trouble, and—”

Sand billowed past Sam, ruffling her clothes and then—

Screaming. 

“Oh my gosh!  You guys can’t just teleport into my car while I’m driving, that’s such a hazard!” shouted Jazz as she tried to correct her course on the road.  “Where did all this sand come from?” A phone started ringing, and Jazz started yelling, “Answer, answer!” instead. 

“Hey, Jazz,” said Danny.  “Is this a bad time?”

.

“Well,” said Coulson in the tone of someone who was habitually forced to roll with insanity.  “That happened.”  He turned to the junior agents that were temporarily assigned to him.  “I think that was Samantha Manson with him.  Take a sample of the sand and—”

“DID YOU JUST VAPORIZE MY BABY?  GHOST!  GHOST!”

He sighed.  He’d been interrupted so many—

A green laser shot past his head, and he dove for cover. 

“Foley has a weapon, sir!”

“I see that,” he said.  “Any ideas on how we can convince her we didn’t vaporize her son?” 

This was going to delay his plan to talk to Valerie Gray. 

Chapter Text

“Let me get this straight,” said Jazz, voice stressed to the point of breaking.  “You want me to steal a bunch of stuff from our parents so that you can help an alien lead an invasion of Earth, because, and I quote ‘he doesn’t really want to do it.’  You’re seriously asking me to do this.  While you’re being mind-controlled by said alien.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Danny.  “You definitely can’t trust anything I’m saying.  Couldn’t even if I’d slept at all since this happened.  I fully encourage you to sabotage anything and everything you give me.  Like, he’s hijacked me pretty well, asking me to help him and all.  I’m pretty sure he’s being mind-controlled, too, though, so…  You know what I’m like.  You know what I spend all my time doing.”

“Danny, you being part of a mind control pyramid scheme does not give me any confidence in your judgment.” 

“That’s fair.  But consider!  You’ll know where I am!  And when!  Great time to do some stuff.  Or not.  Up to you.  Don’t tell me anything.”

Jazz sighed.  “Run through what you want again.”

“All of Mom and Dad’s spare portal stuff.  Porta-Portal if it’s available.  Shields.  Make sure they can hold in physical items, not just ghosts.  I mean.  Since humans are the ones most likely to stop us.  They’ve got Captain America, and he’s not dead!  The spy dudes Mom and Dad are working for now, I mean.  SHIELD.  They have Captain America.  Oh!  We also need—” Danny rattled off a list of components, “—and the ecto-converter.”

“Why do you need the ghost torture device?”

“To be fair, most of what Mom and Dad make are ghost torture devices.  I will also need the ecto-dejecto.”

“Are you planning on plugging yourself into the ghost torture device to power this thing?  Tell me you aren’t.”

“Hahaha, la la la, I can’t hear you, come drop the stuff off or don’t, bring whoever you want with you or don’t, tell anyone you want or don’t, but remember this isn’t my first circus or my first rodeo and be aware that arrow boy will probably try to steal the stuff directly from Fentonworks if you don’t.”

“For the love of—” snarled an older voice, and there was the sound of a brief struggle before the line went dead. 

“Well,” said Sam, who had been silent for the whole call.  A good choice, in Jazz’s opinion.  “That was… not expected.”

“No kidding,” said Tucker, who was trying to stick his staff in his duffle bag.  “So, how are we going to interpret that?”

“Not at face value, that’s for sure.”  Jazz drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.  She had pulled over when Danny called, so she wasn’t driving, but she’d needed something to throttle in lieu of Danny, and the steering wheel was right there.  “He was definitely trying to give us clues.”

“Yeah,” said Sam.  “But it sounds like he doesn’t know that SHIELD is connected to Nazis.”

“You’re not wrong,” said Jazz.  “But…”  She made a face.  Would he fight with Nazis if it meant saving the world?  She certainly didn’t want to.  “How connected are we talking about?  And how?”

“Don’t know,” said Tucker.  “Didn’t have the time to entirely parse what I managed to get into.  I found a lot of mentions, though, and I don’t know that there are all that many good reasons for a hate group to talk so much about a bunch of supposedly dead Nazis.”

“And SHIELD?”

“Also unclear, but, like.  Both the GIW and SHIELD are government things, right?”

“Right,” said Jazz.  “Okay.  You’re right.  We’re going to have to account for that somehow.  But what Danny’s saying…  It sounds like they don’t have enough power to run their portal.  On the surface, this is a way to get that.”

“The surface of the mind control.  It’s like a fig leaf,” said Sam.

“Yeah.  But everything he said about shields…”

“Do you think he was trying to get us to contact SHIELD?” asked Tucker. 

“Maybe, but…  It’s also an opportunity for a trap.  Shields can work both ways.  If you put the portal generator on the outside, it’s basically a cage.”

“A way to trap him and whoever he’s with.”

“Which includes at least the evil space clown,” groaned Tucker.  “Whoever else the guy can brainwash, too.”

Jazz nodded, but she was thinking about something else.  “What about the army?”

“What about the army?” asked Sam.  “It doesn’t sound like we actually have to fight it, just keep the portal closed.  Danny’s only saying he has to do this because, you know.  Mind control.”

“Yeah,” said Jazz, “but…  That still leaves an army out there that wants to attack the Earth.  One with the resources to send Loki in the first place.”

“One that doesn’t matter if they can’t get here,” said Sam. 

“They sent Loki,” said Tucker.  “So, they must have some other way to get here.  It’s probably just harder than using the portal.”  He pointed at the Scarab Scepter.  “Kind of like how I can use that, but it sucks.”

“Do you know how Loki got here?”

“Again, no.  I really need to get back in front of a computer…”

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “Will Danny’s be good for that?”

“I practically built the thing, so, yeah.”

“Great.  But back to the army, what if this is more of a ‘choose where you fight’ thing?”

“Except Danny, or whoever is pulling his strings, picked the meeting place,” said Sam. 

“I’m not sure how important that is,” said Jazz.  “He gave us a lot of information.  I’m not the best with portal physics, but there’s probably a limited number of places that could produce the same amount of power as the ecto-converter.  And then there’s what he said about ‘arrow guy.’”

“Maybe we’re supposed to catch arrow guy in the act or something?”

“I don’t know,” said Jazz.  “It isn’t like Danny to put us in harm’s way.  I think we’re missing something else.”

“He does put us in harm’s way, though,” said Tucker.  “Like, every time we go out on patrol, there’s a chance something will happen.  He tries to keep us safe, but the risk is still there.”

“Plus, if this is an apocalypse-type thing…  And he’s not exactly thinking clearly.”

“That does complicate things,” said Jazz.  She sighed.  “We’re missing something.”

“Well,” said Tucker.  “I recorded the conversation, so we can replay it as much as we want.”

“Great,” said Jazz, starting her car.  “Let’s go.  I want to get home and have some words with my parents about working for sketchy government organizations.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Tucker, with a nervous laugh, “speaking of, we never got to tell you why we had to teleport into your car, did we?”

Jazz took a very deep breath.  “How bad is it?”

“Well…”

.

“I’m not telling you who ‘supplies me,’” said Valerie, crossing her arms.  “Not until you tell me what this is really about.”

“Valerie,” said Damon Gray, his hands tightening on the back of Valerie’s chair. 

“I’m afraid that’s classified, Miss Gray.”

“Not that classified,” said Valerie.  She’d trained herself to fight the dead.  She wasn’t afraid of this guy in a suit.  “I already know it has to do with ghosts, otherwise you wouldn’t care.”  She rolled her eyes.  “I don’t know why you think you’re clever, rolling up with a different acronym or whatever, but I know you’re with the Guys in White.”

“Pardon?”

Her father cleared his throat.  “The Ghost Investigation Ward?  Government sponsored ghost hunters?”

“There are no government sponsored ghost hunters,” said Agent Coulson.  His expression had barely changed, but… 

Valerie blinked, a spark of red tracing over her vision, highlighting small details in the way the agent was holding himself.  She’d done her research, and micro-expressions and body language weren’t to be trusted – law enforcement astrology, some people had called them – but expressions were signaling devices.  Completely ignoring them was also stupid. 

“They’ve got a whole shiny new building as headquarters right outside of Amity Park,” said her father, disbelief coloring his tone. 

“Do they now,” said Coulson with no inflection whatsoever.  “We’ll need to look into that.  But I think we can conclude that you aren’t being supplied by the Fentons.”

Valerie jolted.  “What?”

“At this point, you wouldn’t be hiding it if it were them.   Their interests are too well-known.  But to be honest, your equipment isn’t our chief concern.”  He leaned ever so slightly forward.  “How well do you know Danny Fenton?”

“He’s a classmate,” said Valerie.  She didn’t like where this was going at all. 

“But not just a classmate.  You two were romantically involved.”

“Is there a point to this?” asked her father, the strain in his voice indicating that he’d like nothing better than to throw these men out of their apartment.

“He’s been kidnapped,” said Coulson. 

“What?” said Valerie.  “How?  When?  Why?”

“You don’t think Valerie has anything to do with that,” said Damon, incensed. 

“No.  We’re fully aware of who was involved and who wasn’t.  But considering the circumstances, we aren’t sure if we can rescue him without your help.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ghosts are involved,” said Coulson.  “You would get more of a briefing if you agreed to help.”

“Help how?” asked Damon, darkly.  “You aren’t recruiting my teenaged daughter to fight for you.”

“We’d prefer to have the name of her supplier.  But if that’s impossible, we would like to offer you a consulting position, Miss Gray.  Ghosts are outside our area of expertise.”

Damon leaned forward.  “What exactly is your area of expertise?”

Coulson let himself smile.  “Homeland security.” 

“And you’re interested in a kidnapping because…?”

“A threat may be involved.  Miss Gray, as you might imagine, this is a time sensitive matter.”

Valerie Gray frowned, then opened her mouth to respond.  “I—”

“I think Valerie and I need to have a private discussion,” said Damon.  “If you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” said Coulson.  He left the apartment and waited.  It would have been very easy to eavesdrop.  Trivial.  But he didn’t need to. 

Valerie Gray walked out.  “About that briefing.”

“Excellent.  If you—” His earpiece chirped. 

“We have a reported sighting of Loki in Amity Park.  Correction, make that two Loki sightings.”

.

Unfortunately, nothing short of a Loki sighting was going to get Jazz’s parents out of the lab, so that’s what she manufactured.  Tucker was upstairs, working on hacking government agencies from Danny’s computer and Sam was keeping an eye out for the ‘arrow boy,’ which left Jazz to try to put together the tools they’d need to fight a space clown army and maybe also secret government Nazis. 

Why was their life such a mess?

Jazz picked up one of the Fenton Boo-Staffs and made a face.  She was proficient in its use, but, honestly, they were having enough trouble with magic staffs, weren’t they?  Sure, the Boo-Staff was designed through science, not magic, but the two were converging at a rapid rate. 

Still, she couldn’t turn her nose up at a weapon because of something that boiled down to superstitious associations.  Speaking of associations… 

She turned it over in her hand and gazed contemplatively at the portal.  Danny wanted all the spare portal stuff and the Porta-Portal.  She’d thought that it was because he wanted to cannibalize it to make the alien portal, but that didn’t completely make sense. 

How had this alien been planning to invade if he hadn’t come across Danny?  If he had an army waiting in the wings, there had to have been a great deal of planning for this already.  He must have at least one way to bring the army here that didn’t rely on the work of two obscure scientists and their half-ghost son. 

That wasn’t quite the right angle to approach this from, either. 

She went back to the weapons.  Portal things.  Shields, physical and ghostly and possibly SHIELD the acronym as well.  The ectoconverter.  Danny making references to Circus Gothica and Freakshow—

Wait. 

Not his first circus.  Not his first rodeo. 

Not his first invasion.  Not even his second.

And how had he solved those?  What was the clue here?  Should she even be trying to find clues in what he said, considering the mind control?

She picked the blaster up off the table and fired directly behind her.  There was a cracking sound as the ectoblast hit something physical midair, and Jazz dove for cover. 

“Arrow boy, I presume!” she shouted, because she might as well annoy whoever this was while she had the chance. 

Something thunked into the table next to her, and she rolled away just in time for the metal table to be electrified.  The ectoplasm canisters on the table cracked, bubbled, and started to smoke.  A few of them moved, sluggishly, as if uncertain if they should self-animate or not.

Screw it.  “Activate Security Authorization—”

Something hit her shoulder, toppling her. 

“—Psychic Record!” she finished.  “Red Rover Protocol!”

“Authorization accepted, Jazzerincess!”

At that point, she started to feel the pain.  Arrow boy had, evidently, shot her with an actual arrow. 

Despite humans like this existing, people somehow thought ghosts were outliers.  What a joke. 

She crawled under a different table and listened to the lab’s defense systems activate… and get demolished with the accompanying twang of a bowstring. 

This guy was good.  Which was bad.  Very bad. 

And Jazz was bleeding.  It really hurt. 

A hand pulled her up out of her hiding spot.  “I prefer Hawkeye.”

“You’re going to have to get used to being disappointed,” said Jazz, as cheerfully as she could manage.  Over his shoulder, a figure appeared in the swirling ectoplasmic smoke that had enveloped the room.  “My brother must have told you how bad I am at names.”

Arrow boy didn’t look amused.  “Where’s the portal equipment?”

“You know,” continued Jazz, mostly stalling at this point, “people can fight mind control.  I’ve been working on a study of it.  Most reported successes happen when people are asked to do something they’ve never done, or never would do…  But I guess you’ve killed people before, huh?”

“The portal equipment.  Or I start talking to the kids up—”

Sam whacked arrow boy over the back of his head with the Fenton Creep Stick.  He dropped like a bag of rocks. 

Jazz sighed in relief.  “You’ve gotten better at sneaking.”

Sam, meanwhile, was staring at Jazz’s shoulder in horror.  “Not the time.  Oh, God.”

“I’m okay.”

“You are not.  Who uses arrows?”

.

“You think Danny’s Phantom?”  Valerie shook her head.  “You think Danny is Phantom?”

“Our intel is very good,” said Agent Coulson as he drove. 

Valerie was, possibly, starting to regret agreeing to come.  “You’re sure he isn’t just being overshadowed?”

“Positive.  We have the transformation on tape.”

Okay, that was something. 

“It’s a very impressive lightshow.  Reminiscent of classical Japanese magical girl anime.”

That… sounded way too much like Dani for Valerie’s peace of mind.

“… Assuming you’re right,” she said, slowly, “that means this Loki has all of Phantom’s firepower.”

“That is the problem.”

“And you don’t have anything that can work against him?  Are the Fentons refusing to help or something?”

“The opposite, but none of their weapons seem to work against him.  Possibly he simply knows some weakness in their technology that he hasn’t exploited until now.”

“Danny is smarter than people give him credit for,” said Valerie, leaning back in the car seat and chewing on her thumbnail.  “So, you want my tech to try to fight him.”

“That would be ideal.”

“You aren’t going to get it in the next ten minutes.  If Phantom is there, I’m fighting.”  Best to think of him as Phantom, for now, not Danny.  She’d figure out if Coulson knew what he was talking about later. 

“Miss Gray—"

She scoffed and interrupted him.  “Forget Phantom, an ectopus could completely screw you over if you don’t have reliable tech.”

“A what?”

Unbelievable.  These people had no idea what they’d gotten into, did they?  “Ghost octopus.  Whatever.  My point is that I know how to fight ghosts.  You don’t.  And considering that the world might end if we don’t stop this guy, I’m going to fight and you aren’t going to stop me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I—Wait, really?”

.

“Why do you like using yourself as a distraction so much?” asked Danny. 

Loki rolled his eyes.  “Who says I like it?”

“You keep doing it.”

“Because it’s strategically viable.”

“No one had any idea we were here in the first place.  I think you just like messing with people.  Because you’re a jerk.”

“And I think you are simply upset that I sent Barton to retrieve our equipment without giving your sister the time you wanted.”

Danny was upset about that.  He would probably die upset about it.  That didn’t change the fact that Loki was the jerkiest jerk to ever jerk. 

“She would never have helped us.”

“You don’t know that.”

“She as much as told you no while you were still on the phone with her.”

“That’s just what Jazz is like.”

A collection of black vans, military vehicles, and police cars shrieked to a stop on the road in front of them.  Danny could hear the distant but rapidly approaching whine of something airborne.

“Agent Hill,” said Loki, spreading his arms wide and casually twirling the staff.  “What a pleasant surprise!”

.

“Coulson, the Loki on Park and Amity is the real deal.  Phantom is with him.”

Valerie leaned over.  “Is that Park Park or Park Avenue?  Or Park Street?  Or, wait, do you mean Park Building on Amity Street?  Because that isn’t actually on Park, it’s on the corner of Garden Drive—”

The car went over a bump.  “Send me the coordinates,” said Coulson.  The GPS beeped. 

“Oh, Park Street and Amity Avenue.  No one calls that Park.”  She rolled down her window. 

“What are you doing?” asked Coulson. 

“I told you,” said Valerie, red creeping over his skin, “I’m going to fight!”  Before Coulson could say anything else, she climbed out of the window, summoned her hoverboard and flew to Park Street and Amity Avenue as fast as she could.

.

The only reason Coulson got to Amity Park before Tony did was that SHIELD didn’t give him a ride and he had to fix his instead.  Of course, fixing his suit was the responsible thing to do, he supposed.  He had no fire power and little fighting ability without it.  Martial arts were great and all, but he didn’t think trying to go after Loki bare handed was a smart move. 

And Tony was all about smart moves.  No matter what Pepper said. 

Anyway.

Point was, he was only getting into Amity when the Loki alert went out.  Bad timing in a vast number of ways.  He’d wanted to get his hands on the Fentons’ schematics before round two with the kid. 

“Sir,” said Jarvis.  “There is an unidentified craft ascending at your two o’clock.”

“Magnify.”

Jarvis zoomed in on…  Okay, Tony had officially lost the plot. 

“Patch me to Coulson.  Hey, Coulson, you know anything about little red riding hood on a flying surfboard, or am I hallucinating?”

“Red Huntress is on our side,” said

Tucker hunched over the Ops Center central control panel, trying not to be too nervous about the magic staff that would wake up his super-powered evil side sitting in the bag next to his feet, or Jazz and Sam tying up the mind-controlled government-sponsored assassin behind him.  Oh, he was also trying to hack several different government agencies and also keep an eye out for news about alien invasions, strange lights, Tony Stark, Captain America, Danny, and ghosts, because this was when a ghost would try to stake their claim on Amity Park, without Danny to defend it. 

The staff glittered temptingly, and Tucker pushed it further under the table.  He was pretty sure losing his mind to his jerkish megalomaniac (but very cool) past self would make the situation worse.  How it would make it worse, he wasn’t too clear on, but they already had one guy with delusions of divinity and a staff. 

One was enough. 

(Duulaman was definitely cooler than Loki, though.)

(And better looking.)

“Oh, heck, he’s waking up,” said Jazz, making Tucker jump and twitch towards the staff. 

He managed to abort the motion and prep his lipstick laser instead. 

“I’ll just—” started Sam. 

“You can’t give him another head injury, it might kill him!”

“Jazz, he shot you.  With an arrow.  I don’t really care.”

“Do you want to deal with a vengeful ghost assassin while Danny’s out of commission?”

Sam paused.  “No.”

“We’ve got the Fenton Cuffs on him, anyway.  And the Fenton Chains.  And the—”

“Please stop.  If I hear any more about your parents’ branded torture devices, I might lose my mind.”

At that point, the archer groaned and tried to sit up.  Unfortunately, he’d been attached to the Fenton Balls and Chain (three point five six times better than the original ball and chain!) and sitting up was therefore contraindicated. 

Yeah.  Tucker didn’t know what the Fentons had been thinking, either. 

“Hold up,” said Jazz, kneeling next to the archer, then thinking better of it and kneeling on his chest instead.  He wheezed, almost comically. 

“Uh, Jazz?” said Tucker.  “What are you doing?”

“One second.”  She pulled apart his eyelids with her fingers.  “His eye color is different than it was.”

“Contacts?” suggested Sam.

“I don’t think so,” said Jazz.  “Who’d wear color contacts to rob someone?  I think this kind of mind control must have a visual indicator, like overshadowing.”  She stood up and brushed off her knees, as if kneeling on the archer had made them dirty. 

“Great,” drawled Sam.  “So instead of a Nazi assassin being mind-controlled by an alien invader, he’s just a Nazi assassin.”

“A concussed Nazi assassin,” said Jazz.

“Who’re you callin’ a Nazi?” slurred the archer, squinting up at Sam. 

Sam crossed her arms.  “That’d be the guy working for Hydra.”

“There’s s’meone workin’ for Hydra?  Wha?”

“But more importantly,” said Jazz, “it seems to suggest that unconsciousness may be enough to release Loki’s victims from his control.”

“Like Danny,” said Tucker. 

“Yeah, but then we still have the problem of actually hitting Danny, the Creep Stick’s ability to concuss assassins that use archaic weaponry or no.”  Sam shrugged.  “Maybe if we got all the other people Loki has first?”

“But we’re not limited to the Creep Stick, are we?” asked Tucker.  “That’s why we… went to the museum.”  He rubbed his hands on his pants.  They really shouldn’t be having this conversation in front of the government agent. 

“Yeah,” said Sam, looking uncomfortable.  “But I know that’s… you know.  It’s kind of there for backup.  So we have the option.”

The computer beeped and Tucker spun his chair to look at it, scrolling through his news-scanning programs.  “Ghost Watch just reported a Loki sighting.”

“That’s kind of late, isn’t it?” asked Sam, taking a few steps forward to peer over his shoulder.  “Didn’t you send in that tip over an hour ago?”

“I did, and they reported on it.  This is a different Loki sighting.”  He looked over his shoulder at the archer.  “Is he, like, being a taxi for you guys and then going sight-seeing or what?  Why is he even here?”  The decision didn’t seem to be strategically sound. 

The archer blinked at him.  “Who?”

Great.  Fine.  Not like he’d expected their prisoner to be useful or anything.  He went back to the alert and continued reading, only to close his eyes.  “Danny’s with him.”

“That’s a problem,” said Sam. 

“No kidding,” snapped Tucker.  “At least we know where he is?  We could…”  He trailed off.  “Heck.”  He reached under the table and retrieved his bag. 

“What are you doing?” asked Jazz. 

“Knocking out Danny,” said Tucker, smiling thinly.  “Wish me luck.”

He grabbed the staff- his staff- and let the delicious power of it flow through him.  A gust of sand swept him away and deposited him on the corner of Park and Amity.

It was, of course the wrong Park and Amity, but that was fine.  He was an Amity Park native.  He’d find the right one eventually.  He raised his staff again.    

Chapter Text

Okay, so.  Clint had a concussion.  A nasty concussion.  Not the worst he’d ever gotten, but he was impaired.  Probably wouldn’t be hitting any bullseyes in the next few hours, that was for sure.

However, he wasn’t nearly as impaired as he was letting his current captors believe, thank God.

(No, wait, a god was the reason he was concussed in the first place.  Screw god.)

At least, that had been his initial impression.  When one of his teenage captors disappeared in a whirl of sand and the other two had started hitting buttons that turned the… Yeah, okay, he didn’t know what he was in, but he’d seen brick.  He was pretty sure that things with brick in them weren’t supposed to turn into a blimp.  Or a jet.  Since the two remaining children (who had tied him up surprisingly well) were arguing about turning it into a jet. 

Had Barton seen some weird stuff in his time?  Yes.  Did he frequently work from an aircraft carrier that also flew?  Yes.  Had he just spent the last several days mind-controlled by a Norse deity alongside a kid who was fifty percent dead?  Yes.  Was he, Clint Barton, also incredibly strange?  Yes.  Yes, he most certainly was.

But a guy had to draw the line somewhere.  He was just debating if he should draw the line before or after the weirdly competent children simultaneously being wizards and mechanical geniuses.

… Or, now that he was starting to reorient himself, they were just using the Fentons’ gear.  Where were the Doctors Fenton anyway? 

.

Maddie Fenton squinted at her phone.  “Jack, honey,” she said, with the kind of venomous sweetness she generally reserved for Vlad Masters and Pamela Manson, “I think we’ve been had.”

Jack with an equally uncharacteristic grimness surveyed the mostly empty street.  “I think you’re right.”

“There’s been another report,” said Maddie, still squinting.  She wished she remembered how to make the words on the phone bigger.  “Park and Amity.”

Jack started for the GAV.  “Park Place?  Or Park Row?”

“Park Row is in another city, dear.”

“I was sure there was a Park Row here as well!”

“Alright, and which Amity is it?  Or did you mean A. Mitty?”

“You’re the only one who calls Alfred Mitty Boulevard that, dear.”  Maddie sighed.  “I suppose we’ll just have to check them out one by one.”

“Ha!  Well, with the Fenton Ghost Assault Vehicle, that’ll be a snap!”

.

The most surprising thing about all of this, mused Danny, was that his parents had yet to add to the chaos.  Uncharacteristic of them, really. 

He phased a prone SHIELD agent’s body armor into the sidewalk and pivoted to punch another in the face, bypassing their helmet and face-shield.  Come to think of it, were the ones wearing armor and combat gear agents, or were those just the ones in suits?  Not that it particularly mattered.  His job right now was just to keep anyone from getting killed.  A task that would get exponentially harder once SHIELD’s backup got here. 

“Why,” he asked Loki, when the rhythm of the fight allowed it, “are we still here?”

Yes, technically the answer was ‘we haven’t gotten Barton’s signal yet’ and, yes, he knew the real answer was probably ‘self-sabotage’ of one kind or another, but keeping everyone alive was a strain, if not on his abilities, then on his focus and attention.  There was Loki, Loki’s various minions, SHIELD, the police, random people still inside the nearby building – It was a wonder the GIW hadn’t shown up, and Valerie and his parents would be here before too much longer.  Not to mention—

“Phantom!”

There was a slight pause in the gunfire. 

Danny looked up to see Valerie Gray, Iron Man a growing red streak in the sky behind her.  His secret identity had been a very secondary concern since Loki snatched him, a lost cause, really, considering this fight, but the only way Valerie would have gotten the memo this fast was if someone told her. 

… Maybe Danny would pretend to be mind-controlled a little longer than strictly necessary, for the purpose of punching a certain few SHIELD personnel.  Namely, Fury and Coulson.  He felt like he deserved it.  As a treat. 

“Hi, Red?” tried Danny, knowing that he was just trying to delay the inevitable.

“What,” demanded Valerie, calling up her biggest gun, “do you think you’re doing?”

“We need to leave, now,” said Danny.

Loki grinned.  “But the fun’s just getting started!”  He multiplied himself, which was the ‘we’re leaving’ signal, and Danny disappeared. 

Valerie fired the gun, which was honestly really unfriendly of her.  What had SHIELD been telling her?

Finding the real Loki was easy.  Danny had experience at this point, and a touch was all it took to make him invisible and intangible, too. 

“Do you think Barton’s gotten what we need?” asked Loki, airily. 

“I think Barton’s been caught,” said Danny, flatly.  “If we came to draw out my parents, it hasn’t worked, and the only reason I can think of why it wouldn’t work is if they got distracted by something else.”

“Like Barton breaking in prematurely.”

“Yeah.”

“Pity.  I suppose we’ll have to—”

And this is where Danny was revealed as just as self-sabotaging as Loki, because he had neglected to remember that Valerie’s equipment could pick him up while invisible.  Unfortunately, the fact that he did know that combined with his sharp reflexes meant that he was able to shield himself and Loki from the blast. 

“Oi!  Red riding hood, can you see them in all this?”

“What did you just call me?”

And there was Iron Man.  Lovely. 

“Red, can you point me at them or not?”

“Come on,” said Danny, tugging on Loki’s elbow. 

“But this is entertaining.”

“It’ll be a lot less entertaining when your brother and Captain America get here.”

“Oh, very well.  We’ll go.  To Fentonworks.”

“Oh, come on—”

The sandstorm blindsided them, literally and figuratively, the heat of cutting through Danny despite his intangibility.

“WHEN I FIND LANCE THUNDER,” shouted Tucker, voice supernaturally loud and deep, “I’M GOING TO KILL HIM.  HE KNOWS HOW MANY DIFFERENT PARK AND AMITYS THERE ARE!”

Ah.  Heck.  Duulaman.  Why did Tucker have Duulaman’s scepter?  Were they trying to solve mind control with different mind control?  That was a terrible idea. 

… But admittedly about on par with Danny’s current plan.  Darn it.  There really weren’t a lot of better options out there.

“Oh,” said Loki, “I didn’t know there were any humans who still practiced the arcane arts!”

“Uh huh,” said Danny, pulling on his core to cool the air around them and gritting his teeth.  “That’s Tucker for you.  This is going to be fun.”

“And by fun you mean…?”

“Absolutely miserable.  You’d better hope you’re as good at magic as you think you are.”

“He hasn’t seen us yet.”

Sand swirled around them and deposited them on top of a sand dune directly in the middle of the Park and Amity crossing.  A few of the SHIELD vans had turned to stone, and others were slowly dissolving into sand. 

Tucker was still, mostly, in his normal clothes, but gold bangles were wrapping themselves around his right arm and his beret was looking awfully Nemes-like.  His eyes glittered red, accentuated by kohl. 

The scarab jewel on the end of the scepter flashed, and Danny felt a tug on his mind. 

.

“How dare you,” hissed Loki, reasserting his control of Phantom with a twist of his staff.

“How dare you,” snapped the dark-skinned boy.  “He’s mine.  He was mine first, and you have no right to him!”

“I have every right!  I am a god, you pathetic sorcerer!”  Loki called on his magic, and on Phantom’s blanketing the sand with ice. 

“You?” sneered the boy, tilting his chin up.  “You think you are a god?  I am Nebmaatre Djedamun, called Duulaman!  I am the Son of Ra!  The Son of the Sun!  I have lived and walked through the Duat and returned, as Osiris!  Who are you, foreigner, to take what is mine?”

The ice beneath Loki began to steam, and the sun burned down from directly overhead, a position it should not be in under any circumstances at this latitude on Earth. 

So.  That was how it was going to be, was it?

“I am Loki Laufeyson, god of mischief and rightful king of Asgard.”  He bared his teeth and called up his armor, scepter growing into a full staff, the false sand desert morphing into an equally false vista of ice.  “Let’s see if you’re worth my time.  Human.”

 .

It turned out that extended desert-based trauma and resultant obsessive sand-proofing of technology was good for something.  That something was freak sandstorms caused by strangely glow-y teenagers.  Who knew.  Not Tony, that was for sure. 

“Hey, Red, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” hissed the girl – and Tony really had to have words about whoever was setting SHIELD policy regarding the recruitment of teenagers, planetary threat or not – doing something that had her hoverboard zooming back to her, shedding sand as it went. 

“Great,” said Tony, “you know this new guy?”

Red was silent, and Tony wished he could see her face through the tinted visor of her suit.  “I know the kid, not the ghost possessing him.  I’ve never seen any of them use sand like this before.”  She looked up.  “Or the sun.”

Yeah, whatever was going on with the sky was throwing Tony for a loop.  Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, yadda, yadda, yadda, like he hadn’t heard that spewed in his direction a few hundred times.  Thor made him believe it a little more, though.  There had to be some explanation behind all the freaky stuff he could do. 

The sand was abruptly replaced by a blizzard, and Tony pulled the girl to the roof of one of the buildings just in time for the river to melt into a gleaming river, its banks thick with reeds and flowers.  The river rose out of its bed, sporting fangs and scales, eyes sharply green.  Sand sizzled against its clawed feet and the plants wilted and burned.  The good thing was, there didn’t seem to be any actual people down there, beyond Loki, Fenton, and the new kid. 

The possessed new kid.  More mind control.  Just what they needed. 

“Any way to un-possess someone?”

“Shoot them with one of these,” said Red, lifting a gun Tony was pretty sure she hadn’t had before.  He had no idea where she had gotten it from.  Neat. 

He reached for it.

“Nuh uh,” said Red.  “This stays with me.”

“Okay, little Red, I don’t know if you’ve noticed—"

“Here’s how this’s gonna go,” Red interrupted him.  “I’m going to go take down Phantom while those two are distracted with each other.  You cover me.  Once I’ve got Phantom, I’ll shoot the ghost in Tucker out, and you and SHIELD have a clean shot at Lorry or whatever.”

“And I’ll be way better at covering you if I have a weapon that can actually do damage to these guys.”

“I don’t have time to argue with a stupid billionaire—”

The building they were standing on turned into a sphinx, and moved, dumping them at its feet.  It leaned close and growled, eyes glowing.  Both Tony and Red fired at it, their weapons leaving craters on its face.  It only made it flinch. 

Then lightning cleaved the sky. 

“It’s about time!” shouted Tony, ignoring Jarvis’s comment about the rising temperature of the sand for the moment. 

Thor jumped up on the rubble that had been the sphinx and shrugged.  “The directions were very confusing, and there is strange sorcery on this place!” 

“No kidding!  Where’s capsicle?”

“Captain Rogers was taking the plane with the Widow!”

Next to him, Red started to move again.  “You’re not a ghost,” she said. 

“Yeah, he’s an alien, get with the program.  Are you sure you can take care of Fenton?”

If Tony hadn’t been looking for it, he wouldn’t have caught the split-second hesitation.

“I’ve fought him before,” said Red. 

That didn’t mean anything by itself.  Tony had frequently fought gravity, the ground, and chemistry during pre-horrible-kidnapping benders.  That didn’t mean he’d ever had any chance of winning.  Still, he supposed they had to take it.  There weren’t any other options. 

“Come on, Red, you know I was always holding back.”

Feeling like he was in a cheap horror movie, Tony looked to the right to see Danny Fenton. 

.

Delight was almost certainly the wrong emotion to be experiencing at the moment, but Danny wasn’t exactly in what he’d describe as a proper state of mind.  Besides, Tucker’s giant lens was really cool.  Danny hadn’t known that a lens made out of illusions could focus light like that, but it was logical enough.  Most illusions probably were just bending light, at their base.  Although why he was going through the steps of creating a false sun, the fake lens, and aiming, Danny didn’t know.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just create lasers or something like that to begin with?

“There is something wrong with the people on this planet,” hissed Loki, ripping the lens to shreds before it could melt through Danny’s ice shield.

“Well, yeah,” said Danny.  “But I’m not sure you can generalize what’s wrong with Tucker to the rest of the planet.”  He leaned as heavily into his ice powers as he dared in human form, which was actually quite far, and used telekinesis to bat away a pair of animate statues. 

Arctic cold and equatorial heat pushed together in the air, swirling into clouds.  Lightning forked from the sky.  Danny caught a bolt and swung it to the side, glassing the sand under him. 

Tucker was looking up at the sky, teeth barred.  “Who dares strike against my people?”

Oh, Tucker really was a great friend.  But fighting Thor really wasn’t a good idea—Assuming the lightning was Thor arriving, and not a random weather phenomenon caused by three people with superpowers playing with the laws of physics.

Good distraction, though. 

Danny appreciated what Tucker was—Well.  What he assumed Tucker was trying to do, underneath the past life personality takeover.  Rescue him, and all.  But Danny did have his orders.

Loki’s mind control and Tucker’s were different.  Loki’s was focused and direct, while Tucker’s diffused like dust on the air, subtle but insistent.  Loki’s staff was of this world, powered by something native to this part of the universe.  Duulaman’s was laced with ghost magic.  Loki’s drew on something primal, something that brushed at some fundamental force Danny could only guess at.  Duulaman’s control was woven, carefully, from ancient spells layered on one another like steel folded over and over. 

Tucker’s pull on Danny’s mind wasn’t negligible, but Loki’s control of Danny was stronger.

Also, this couldn’t possibly be healthy for Tucker. 

“Tucker!” shouted Danny, over the howling wind.  “Snap out of it!  Don’t let Duulaman make you do this!”

The expression on Tucker’s face was offended and incredulous.  Danny would have liked to laugh but the fate of the world was at stake here. 

“That’s what I want to say to you, idiot!”

“Hey, I’m not doing this willingly!  Why do you even have that?  You know what it does to you!”

“Forgive me for wanting to get the big guns when my best friend is shanghaied to lead an alien invasion!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not leading it, that’s all him!”  He gestured behind him in Loki’s general direction. 

Oh, and there was Thor.  And Iron Man.  And Val.  Oh, they really did have to get out of here.  Danny didn’t think he could handle all this while still in human form.  They looked like they were having some sort of planning session over by the sphinx, but he didn’t think that would last all that long.  On the other hand, it looked like Loki was sneaking up on them, so that was about to become very interesting.

The sensation Danny was coming to associate with Duulaman’s magic spiked as Tucker tightened his grip on the staff.  “His arrow minion shot Jazz.”

Danny froze.  “Is she okay?”

“She’s not bleeding to death, if that’s what you mean,” said Tucker. 

Danny expanded the list of SHIELD agents he wanted to hit to include Barton.  He probably wouldn’t hit him, given the mind control, but he wanted to. 

“Look,” said Danny.  “I do have a plan.”  One that was, admittedly, falling apart rapidly. 

“Which you haven’t told us beyond trying to use us for shopping!” 

The influence of Tucker’s magic on Danny wasn’t as strong as Loki’s.  But that didn’t mean it was nothing. 

Danny gritted his teeth.  “That’s because the stuff wasn’t for me to use, it’s for you.”

And then Tucker was hit by one of Iron Man’s repulsor bursts.

.

In Tony’s defense, he still wasn’t used to the illusion thing, and he wasn’t the only one who had fallen for the fake Fenton.  He hadn’t meant to hit the kid with the staff, and given a few minutes out of battle, he’d probably feel bad about it. 

He also hadn’t realized how angry Fenton would get about it. 

The boy’s body flickered and his eyes started to glow with a radioactive light even as the rest of him seemed to fade into shadow.  The air got cold and heavy. 

And then the quinjet arrived, laying down cover fire between Phantom and Tony.  The feeling vanished as Fenton threw up a shield, protecting himself and Loki.

And then, because the day just had to get weirder, a blimp with Jack Fenton’s face on it showed up and started shooting at the quinjet. 

And then an absolute monstrosity of a vehicle, an unholy cross between an RV and a tank, barreled over the top of a nearby dune and started blasting everyone.

Between defending himself and trying to keep the poor unconscious kid from getting shot again, Tony was just barely able to see Phantom grab Loki’s arm and phase into the ground.  What he wouldn’t give to be able to get out of stupid situations so easily. 

Finally, proving that the only god of this world or the next was Murphy, a green-tinged energy bolt went wide, soaring over the sand, the ice, and several streets’ worth of intact buildings to ping off the bottom of the helicarrier and somehow short out all the camouflage panels. 

The fighting stopped as the blimp turned into a jet and zoomed – complete with sound effect – away, and the Fentons seemed to realize who they were firing at. 

A blond civilian Tony had somehow missed in the chaos staggered into view, followed by a bedraggled cameraman.  “Yes!” he said, hands raised in jubilation.  “Yes!  Now this is some freak weather, baby!  Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to report on the weather?  This is the best day I’ve had all week!”

Before Tony had any time to process that, Maddie Fenton got out of the Monstrosity (which was quickly becoming capitalized in Tony’s head), calmly walked over, and slapped the man across the face.  She grabbed his shirt and pulled him down to her level.  “Do you have any idea how many Parks and Amitys there are in this town?”

Chapter Text

“I can’t believe we left Tucker.  I can’t believe you left Tucker.  With nazis.”

“Sam, in case you didn’t notice, the nazis had a spaceship,” said Jazz, her voice shaking with stressed control.  “I don’t think Tucker would appreciate us getting killed by nazis with spaceships.  Nazis with spaceships that can become invisible, oh my gosh.”

“Can’t we become invisible?”

“Not really!”  Jazz’s hands flew over the control.  “We really just need to be somewhere else right now.”

The prisoner cleared his throat behind them.  “It’s not a spaceship, actually.  It’s a helicarrier.”

Sam and Jazz turned to glare at arrow boy.

“What does that mean?” asked Sam as Jazz went back to the controls. 

“It’s like a aircraft carrier, but it flies.”

“Oh, yes, that’s a much less terrifying thing for nazis to have!  What a relief!”  Sam spread her hands wide. 

“SHIELD also isn’t nazis.  Maybe if you told me why you think we’re, uh.”  He blinked hard and rolled his neck.  “Nazis.  As far as I know, SHIELD’s never even talked to you guys.”

“We know about your links to HYDRA,” said Sam. 

“HYDRA?  HYDRA doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Groups like that never really go away,” said Sam.  “We haven’t even managed to get rid of people who openly call themselves nazis.”

“Seriously, they were wiped out by Captain America and the Howling Commandos.  Any of them that survived them were swept up and died ages ago.”

“Right,” said Jazz, slowly, tone at odds with what she was still doing with the controls.  “Captain America.”

“Yes, Captain America.”

“You ever meet him?”

“No,” said arrow boy.  “Does it matter?”

Jazz didn’t say anything. 

“Does it mean anything?” asked Sam. 

“Maybe,” said Jazz, “but I have to fly this thing right now.”

.

Tucker woke up with a groan and scrubbed vigorously at his face, as though that would help the combined headache and rubbed-raw-with-sandpaper feeling he was currently experiencing.  Rather, he tried.  His hands appeared to be strapped down. 

He lay still, wracking his brain for which of Danny's enemies would bother knocking him out, kidnapping him, and tying him up.  Spectra, maybe?  Walker?  He had to have a sentence by now, even if he never stuck around long enough for Walker to read him his charges. 

“Mr. Foley.”

That voice had not belonged to a ghost.  Tucker pried his eyes open.  “Wuh?” he managed to say.  A black-brown blur moved subtly against a grayish background.  Probably a person. 

“Mr. Foley,” repeated a voice that emanated from the vicinity of the blur.  “I’m going to have to ask you how you moved several tons of Egyptian sand to a street in a small American town and turned several nearby buildings into sphinxes.”

“Don’t forget the lasers, sir,” said a second, paler, blur.  This blur sounded vaguely familiar, but Tucker couldn’t place it.

“Thank you, Agent Coulson.  We are also interested in the lasers.”

Tucker blinked several times.  Who was this clown?

Clown.  Wait. 

Oh, no.  Oh, he didn’t.  He wouldn’t. 

He did.  He’d used that stupid scepter and then lost it.

At least it explained why he felt like he’d been sandpapered. 

Hold up – ‘agent?’  There was only one group that habitually operated in Amity Park and that was the GIW.  But the GIW wouldn’t be bothering with questions.  They’d jump straight to the painful experiments. 

“Are you SHIELD?” asked Tucker, angry.  “I’m not telling you anything.”

The pale blob cleared its throat.  “According to our research, you haven’t had any prior interactions with SHIELD.  Why are you so hostile?”

Tucker’s eye twitched and he tugged his wrist against whatever was holding it down.  “Maybe it has something to do with you tying me up.”

“You did try to bite Mr. Stark the first time you woke up,” pointed out the pale blur.

“A common desire.  We won’t hold it against you.  So long as you explain why.”

He’d tried to bite Tony Stark?  Iron Man?  He bit his tongue before he could ask if he did it while Tony Stark was still wearing his suit.

“I’m not explaining anything to nazis who kidnapped my best friend!”  Okay, that last bit was maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but nazis didn’t deserve any grace, either. 

(And the leftovers of whatever had knocked him out might be screwing with his judgment.  Or maybe it was the scepter!  Who knew!)

(Was this what taking drugs was like?  Was the scepter a drug?  Could he get addicted to it?)

“We aren’t nazis,” said the pale blur in a somewhat pained tone. 

“And we didn’t kidnap your friend.  We had hired him as a consultant.”

“You were giving him money?” asked Tucker, skeptical.  

The pause spoke volumes. 

“Why do you think we’re nazis?”

“Uh, because you are.  I’m not an idiot.  I know what HYDRA is.  They’re talking to the Guys in White, and they’re talking to you, so you can’t be all that much better.”

(Something told Tucker that maybe he shouldn’t be saying quite as much as he was and he should just shut up, but the idea of being interrogated by nazis was terrifying.)

(He may have picked up some coping mechanisms from Danny.)

“That’s the second time I’ve heard the GIW mentioned today,” said the pale blur.  “The other time, it was from Miss Gray.”

“Government-backed ghost hunters, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Interesting.  And you say they’re talking about HYDRA?”

“As if you don’t know,” scoffed Tucker. 

The pale blur took a couple of steps closer to Tucker.  “You’re a bit of a hacker, aren’t you?  Is that how you found this… supposed connection?”

Tucker turned his head away.

“Agent Coulson.”

The blurs moved to one side, and out a door that disappeared from Tucker’s sight as soon as it was closed.  Great.  Cool.  This was awesome. 

He pulled against whatever was holding him down again.  There was some way to get out of stuff like this, right?

.

“I don’t like that we didn’t know about this GIW,” said Fury. 

“Neither do I.  Sir, can I suggest we get Stark on this to confirm Foley’s claims?”

“We need him to track Loki.”

“I don’t believe it will take Stark that long to follow a trail a teenager laid.”

“I’ll remind you that this teenager was able to fight Loki head-on, and we don’t need another loose cannon.”

“Another reason to have him on side, although I’m not sure that translates to computer skills.  In any case, sir, given that he’s already finding the time to look into our other projects on his own time…” 

Fury clasped his hands behind his back, thinking. 

“Miss Gray and the Fentons have contributed to our tracking efforts as well.”

“Alright,” said Fury.  “Notify Stark and I’ll talk to Red Huntress about the GIW.  We need more detail.”

Coulson nodded.  “I’m sure Tony will be happy to meet a fan.  Well.”  He tilted his head.  “Re-meet them.”

.

Tony was not, in fact, happy.

“You know,” he said to Natasha, who had let him into the ‘observation room,’ “I get that the kid is scary, but did you have to tie him down?”

“He tried to bite you,” said Natasha. 

Tony raised a finger.  “In his defense, I did knock him out.”  He sat down in front of the one-way mirror.  The room wasn’t very big.  Space was probably at a premium in this bucket.  It was huge, but it was also flying.  Airplane bathrooms were tiny for a reason.  The cell on the other side wasn’t all that large either.  Just big enough for the bed and a couple people to loom. 

“Microphone?” he asked, pointing at a button.  That’s the one he’d use for that function, but, as evidenced by the whole situation, the people here were nuts.  And with Tony saying that, it meant something.  The button could release sleeping gas or fire missiles.

“Yes,” said Natasha.  “You don’t have to look so surprised.  It isn’t as if we’re going to put missile launchers in a holding cell.”

“And this makes it so he can see us?”

“It brings the lights up in the other room, yes.”

“Old fashioned for you guys, isn’t it?”

“Don’t fix what isn’t broken.”

“Hilarious,” said Tony.  “You can go, now.  Do your spy stuff.” 

Natasha raised an eyebrow.  “You’re joking.”

“It was worth a shot.”  Tony shrugged.  He pressed the buttons.  “Hey, Tucker, right?”

“I’m not telling you people anything!”

“I can understand not being eager to talk to the goon squad, but it’s not like I work with them, either.  Between the two of us – don’t worry about the Russian in the corner – I was looking into them, too, but I haven’t found out much yet.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m still tied up.  You’re so against SHIELD you’re okay with a babysitter.”

“Unfortunately, there’s more of them than there are of me, and we do have a crazy kidnapping alien to deal with.  But, hey, one tech wiz to one tech wizard, we can find out if HYDRA is really involved before too long.”

“Or you could be on their payroll.”

“Oh, come on.  I don’t need SHIELD’s money.”

“Oh yeah?” said Tucker, voice cracking.  “And who are you?”

“Wh—I’m Tony Stark.  You know, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist?”

“I don’t know you’re Tony Stark.  You could be any white guy.”

“Any white guy?  I thought you were a fan, that’s what your—” Tony thought back to when he’d first seen Tucker Foley, on the ground in Amity Park.  Compared to the Egyptian stuff and the magic, it wasn’t so noticeable, but he’d been wearing glasses.  “You’re nearsighted, aren’t you?”

“Wow, it’s almost like your super awesome nazi information network isn’t as good as you think it is.”

Tony turned to look at Natasha.  “I don’t suppose you guys have some spare glasses?”

She sighed heavily, but pushed herself off the wall she was leaning on and left.  Which meant it was prime time to break into the holding cell. 

It wasn’t hard. 

“Okay, kid, I’m going to untie you, but you have to promise not to try to bite me.”

“No promises,” said Tucker. 

“Fair enough.”  Tony started in on the straps.  They were simple, too.  Low tech.  Just padded leather and buckles.  Probably to keep people from hacking in and springing whoever was in them. 

Tucker was sitting up in a moment, rubbing at his wrists.  “Okay, possibly Tony Stark, mind getting me out of this room for an encore?”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t help you much.”

“Why not?”

“We’re a few hundred feet up.”

“What?”

“Yeah, feel that low pressure?  Pop your ears?  Kinda dry air?  Inertia’s a bit weird?”

“Oh gosh, we’re on another airship.  No, wait.  We’re on that—That aircraft carrier thing?”

Tony raised his eyebrows.  “You know about it?”

“Glanced at plans for it while I was looking for Danny.”

“You really did hack SHIELD, huh?” said Tony.  “What kind of machine did you use?”

“Just my home computer.”

“Built it yourself?”

“With whatever I could scrounge up.  I don’t get much allowance.”

Impressive, if true; but he wouldn’t tell him if there was anything special if he was in Tucker’s position.  So.  He didn’t exactly believe it. 

“No crazy ghost stuff?”

Tucker glared at him. 

There was the sound of a speaker crackling to life.  “Stark.”

“Romanov.”

“What are you doing in the cell?”

.

As soon as she entered the room, Valerie Gray crossed her arms and planted her feet.  The red material of her suit flexed easily, reflecting circuit-board-like patterns where it caught the light.

“Miss Gray,” he said.  “I understand you’ve had contact with an organization called the GIW.”

“The Guys in White, yeah.”  She glanced around, the motion small, but not unnoticeable, although her face mask hid exactly what she was looking at.  “I mean, their official name is the Ghost Investigation Ward, but everyone calls them the Guys in White.  Easier than the acronym.”

“And what, exactly, do they do?”

“Mostly?  Cause property damage and threaten to audit people’s taxes.”

“But they’re ghost hunters.”

“Yeah.  I don’t think they’ve ever caught one, though.  They’re worse than the Fentons.  They almost killed this one kid, Elliot, because they thought he was a ghost.”

“Have they ever shown any evidence that they are part of the government, or government sanctioned?”

“I never looked into it,” said Gray.  “I had other things to deal with.  You guys have really never heard of them?”

“We have not, which is, as you might imagine, troubling.”

“I get that,” said Gray.  “But is this really the best time?  I mean… they’ll still be there when you get done with the aliens, right?”

If Fury was to answer honestly, the answer would be no.  If he were their leader, he’d be pulling them out of Amity Park, going to ground now that SHIELD’s attention had been drawn to the town they were… occupying?  Harassing?  Deceiving?

Exactly what they were doing didn’t matter so much as them having been able to do it without SHIELD noticing.  Especially given Foley’s assertion regarding HYDRA. 

“There are a limited number of actions I can take until we manage to track down Loki.” 

Gray twitched.  “Danny doesn’t always show up on ghost scanners.”

Which was truly unfortunate.  “I’m aware.  What kinds of resources have you seen the GIW using?”

.

Despite Natasha deciding to take forever to give the kid his glasses, which then stalled things further as he really hadn’t believed that Tony was Tony, and he was a fan.  Like, to an embarrassing degree.  Don’t get him wrong!  Tony loved having fans.  But there was a time and a place to ask for autographs. 

Tony really wasn’t happy about him being up here.  Let alone the other kid.  The girl.  Speaking of which he really needed to talk to her about her tech, beyond the tracker, see if any of it could be incorporated in one of his suits on the fly.  But as good as he was at multitasking, Coulson had whisked Gray away to talk to Fury at the same time he sent Tony down here with his babysitter. 

Anyway. 

“So, show us the nazis,” said Tony, pushing a tablet at him. 

It was immediately snatched away by Natasha.  “You are not giving the teenage hacker direct access to our systems.”

“You’re going to have to if you want me to show you.”

“Or you can just tell him.  It is my understanding that he’s passable at programming.”

“Passable?  Didn’t you make an AI when you were just—”

“There you go.  No need to butter his ego.  Just get it done.”  She gave the tablet back to Tony. 

Tony made a face at her.  He’d wanted to see how Tucker worked.  “Fine.  Kid, give it to me.”

“Well, you’ll want to start with…”

.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Tucker, half jogging after ‘Romanov’ and Tony Stark.  “You can’t just go tell this guy that there’s nazis everywhere.  This whole place is,” he lowered his voice, “riddled with nazis.  He could be a nazi.  What we need to do is leave.”

“Director Fury is not a nazi,” said Romanov.

“You don’t know that.  You saw some names of people you knew in those files, didn’t you?  But there were code names, too.  Literally anyone could be one of them.”

“Which is why we shouldn’t be having this conversation in the open.”

Romanov had only consented to bringing Tucker with them because Tony had pointed out that what he knew made him an assassination target.  Tucker very much not enthused about that particular factoid, especially the part where it made him feel even worse about leaving Jazz and Sam with arrow boy.

“Hey,” he whispered to Tony, “d’you think that maybe, just maybe, she’s taking us to him because she is also a nazi?”

“She’s not,” said Tony, who was apparently a bit of an idiot once he got away from his area of expertise, in which he was godlike.  “I’m at least eighty percent sure she would have just let me die that one time if she were a nazi, because I am staunchly anti-nazi, and also a superhero.  It’d be pretty dumb of them to save my life, don’t you think?”

“Maybe that’s just what they want you to think.”

“If I can hear you,” snapped Romanov, “so can other people.  Hurry up.”

They turned into a more populated hallway, and Romanov flashed a badge at a group of agents, who let her pass.  She pressed her hand against a palm reader next to the door, which opened, revealing a tall, one-eyed black man and… Valerie?

“What are you doing here?” asked Tucker.  But of course Valerie was here.  She already had a track record of trusting really, incredibly sketchy people.  Why not extend it?

“I’m trying to fix the problem your friend caused,” snapped Valerie.

“You dated him,” said Tucker. 

Valerie stiffened.  “And you made the problem worse.  Do you have any idea what Park and Amity look like now?”

“Which Park and which Amity?” Tucker responded automatically. 

“Okay,” said Tony, “whatever schoolyard tiff or middle school drama you two have going on right now can wait.  We’ve got a massive problem.”

.

Fury could admit that he’d expected, had wanted, Foley to be wrong about SHIELD being infiltrated by a group calling themselves HYDRA. 

But the evidence was extensive and damning.  HYDRA was in SHIELD.  In some places, it practically was SHIELD.  And it was all discovered by a teenager via a built-in backdoor used by an organization Fury had never heard of before today.

They couldn’t afford to act on it now.  Not with an alien invasion breathing down their necks.  They couldn’t afford not to act on it.  Not when Tucker Foley wouldn’t cooperate if they didn’t.  Hell, neither would any of the rest of the heroes he’d recruited. 

Something burned in his gut.  SHIELD was supposed to be a shield for the world, not for a bunch of lunatics who were still fighting World War II and committing atrocities that civilized society didn’t even have names for.  This was his life’s work, and it was all a lie. 

But he had to put aside his anger and his grief.  There was work to be done. 

“Did you really not know?” asked Foley. 

“No,” said Fury. 

“What are you going to do about it?”

“He’s not going to do anything about it,” said Stark, flat and dry.  “He’s got a potential alien army bearing down.  He’s not going to split focus.  That right?”

“What?” exclaimed Foley, leaning forward.  “But that’s crazy.  These are people doing real damage right now.  You don’t know what the GIW’s been doing to Amity Park, and they’re the incompetent ones!”

“I’m aware.  But at the moment, Loki is an existential threat for humanity as a whole, not just—”

“HYDRA is also an existential threat for humanity.”  Foley clenched his fists.  “Look, just give me back my staff, and I’ll take care of Loki for you.  Then you don’t have to worry about it.”

“You weren’t exactly winning before,” said Natasha. 

“I was doing better than you.”

“And your behavior has changed.  The way you speak, the way you hold yourself… it’s different.  That staff doesn’t just give you power, does it?  It changes you somehow.”

Foley fidgeted.  “You’ve got Dr. Bruce Banner with you.  It’s not like you’re against that kind of thing in principle.”

“No, but we need to know we’re not just replacing one threat with another.  Can you honestly say you won’t become one?”

“I can honestly say I will if you ignore the GIW and HYDRA!”

“Mr. Foley.  Without knowing exactly who is and who is not a HYDRA agent, all I would be doing would be starting a bloody civil war that would, potentially, kill everyone on this plane in the crossfire.  Do you want that?”

“No,” said Foley, “but I’m not working with HYDRA.  You can’t expect Captain America to work with HYDRA.”

“No,” agreed Fury.  “Having you directly involved with any but the most vetted of agents would be a mistake.”  Foley would be far too easy to assassinate or disappear.  “That’s why I’m sending you away.  That’s why I’m sending all of you away.”

“I’m sorry, what?” said Stark, rising to his feet.  “You can’t bring us here, say the world’s under attack by aliens, ghosts exist, and, oh, yeah, we have a HYDRA infestation, then tell us to leave.”

“Will you calm down and listen to me?” asked Fury, fixing Stark with a look.  “I’m sending you away.  As a group.  Foley, I’m assuming you have some way to get in touch with whoever is piloting that blimp.”

“Yeah?”

“Fentonworks’ technologies are going to be better at tracking Fenton’s energy signature than whatever you and Dr. Banner jury-rigged out of Miss Gray’s suit, and if not, you can fix it.  You’re bound to be able to adapt the rest of them into something useful for combat.  Captain Rogers has experience leading small groups against covert and secretive operations and fortifications.  Thor, as far as I can tell, has worked almost solely with small-group tactics, and knows his brother and Dr. Selvig.  Natasha knows Barton, and given how competent he is, I’d bet my good eye that Loki has him working as his right hand.”  Much like Fury occasionally did… although he used Coulson for that purpose far more often. 

“Hopefully I know Barton better than Thor knows Loki.”

“Unless Loki actually brings his army through, you should, in theory, be a match for him, whoever he has brainwashed, and whatever mercenaries he’s managed to contact.”

“And if he does manage to bring his army through?” asked Stark.  “Just saying, we haven’t done the best job at stopping it so far.”

“Then you call me.”

Foley cleared his throat.  “Uh, about this Barton.  He wouldn’t happen to really have a thing for arrows, would he?”

Chapter Text

Loki was shaking.  He was furious.  He was excited.  That boy had been so powerful.  Unheard of for a human.  By Loki’s estimate he was about the same age as his boy.  Amassing something like that in less than two decades was…  astounding.  And the way he used it!  Truly, Loki had rarely met a more kindred spirit. 

It complicated everything immensely, especially when coupled with the disappearance of Barton.  After all, no Barton meant no materials.  And they needed those materials, or, at least, the energy source.  Everything else was being labored over by Dr. Selvig and the assistants Loki had procured for him. 

On the other hand, the fight in Amity Park might have been enough to get Earth’s defenders to really hate him.    

No, that wasn’t what he’d been trying to do.  He was trying to divide them.  Divide and conquer, as they said, and Loki would conquer them.  They were divided.  They…  The boy, the pharaoh, he would be against Iron Man, if nothing else.  His boy’s other young friends didn’t seem terribly enamored of the heroes, either.  Likely, they would spend as much time getting SHIELD’s way as Loki’s in an attempt to get their other friend back. 

Not as good as crashing their ridiculous airship, but not terrible, all things considered. 

“That was stupid,” said the boy.  “That whole thing was stupid.  If you’d just waited—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Loki.  “We still have the original plan.”

“Which was terrible.  Maybe…”  The boy glanced at where Selvig was working and licked his lips.  “What if we spliced into the power cable in the ocean?  Keep everything out of New York?  If the army you’re bringing can deal with space they can deal with water, right?”

“They can do many things,” said Loki, vaguely.  “But we cannot breathe underwater.”

“I don’t need to breathe.”

“And the rest of us?”

“We can steal a boat.”

Loki raised an eyebrow.  “I must commend your dedication to…” he trailed off.  Thanos’s herald was plucking at the strings of his mind.  He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.  When was the last time he’d slept?  He’d have to meditate and see what the irritating and impatient creature wanted. 

He wanted- He needed—

Ice, invigorating and incongruous, washed over him, sweeping away the pull on his mind.  He breathed in through his teeth and rounded on the boy. 

“What did you do?”

“I helped you.  Mind control is unfriendly.”

Loki snarled.  “Boy, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Yes.  But my name is Danny.”  He tilted his head.  “I’m pretty sure I’ve told you that before.”

“That is my contact with my army!”

“It isn’t really yours, though, is it?”

Loki raised his hand, intending to strike the boy for his impudence, but…  He dropped it.  There was no point to it.  Loki would merely have to find some way to instruct him not to interrupt the connection again without subverting his other, more important orders. 

Later, later.  Unless he was contacted again, it wasn’t a priority. 

“We could try to contact Jazz again.  I’d bet they took the equipment I asked for with them.”

“We are not talking to your sister.  We do not need any of that so-called equipment, regardless.”

“Yeah, sure, and do you really need an army from somewhere else?  I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but look at everything you’ve already done all by yourself!”  He spread his hands to either side.  “Why not just keep doing this?  I’m sure that by the time whoever is really in charge of that army gets here, you’ll have gotten Earth to the point where it can more than match them.”

“Stop,” said Loki.  That was all irrelevant.  It was meaningless.  He could not—No.  Fighting Thanos was impossible.  All he could do was this.  All he could do… 

But the boy’s suggestion had merit.  Somewhat.  He had—He could—

His skin felt like it was crawling off.  Memories of—

He had made a mistake, and it would be—

There was much a god could endure—

Falling—

Danny put his hand on Loki’s arm and ice pricked at his skin.  It was like holding the Casket of Ancient Winters.  It was like touching a blizzard.  It was like the chill in his own blood. 

He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, gently.  “Danny,” he said, voice soft, “this is the only way.  This is the only choice.  Everything else… is worse.”

“Sometimes, the right choice only seems worse.  Sometimes, the worse choice is the only one you can live with making.  The only one that won’t haunt you forever.”

“Then you understand me perfectly.”  He patted Danny on the shoulder, then turned away.  “We are going to Stark Tower.”

.

“Like some kind of prisoner exchange?” asked Jazz. 

“No,” said Tucker.  “Because of the whole HYDRA thing, they don’t want the really awesome people who are partially famous for being nazi haters to be here.  But they need a place to deal with the alien problem.”

Well, they weren’t the only ones.  Jazz would even say that the alien problem was her top priority right now, right after not bleeding out or crashing.  She looked back at Barton. 

“And you’re sure arrow boy isn’t a nazi?”

“I’m not sure,” said Tucker.  “But based on what I’ve seen behind the curtain, I doubt it.  Unless he’s one of these codename guys.  There’s… a lot of double, triple security on everything and some of it is in languages I don’t speak.  They didn’t put sensitive stuff where the GIW could get it easily.  I guess the GIW were sort of the idiot cousins in all this.  Too loyal and know too much to completely brush off or take out when they have so few people comparatively, but too incompetent to put on anything they thought was real or important.”

“And no one believes in ghosts,” said Jazz. 

“You’d think that people would be more credulous, considering the whole super-soldier thing was decades ago and Thor is, you know, around.  Existing.  All those aliens.  Oh, and they’re not even—” He broke off.  “Okay, yeah, I know you don’t want me to talk about it, but who do you think was the first person I showed when I hacked you?  Get off my back.  There are so many other aliens.  There are even shape shifting aliens, just living here.  Like a Men in Black situation.”  Something in the background of Tucker’s call got very loud and annoyed looking. 

“And you’re sure none of these people are nazis?”

“Pretty sure.  The one woman is Russian, though.  Maybe.  Her accent is really good.  And Thor’s…  He’s not actually Scandinavian.  It’s whatever.  Look, I’ve only met, like, Stark.  And the Russian.  So, you aren’t exactly getting a personal vetting, here.”

Jazz sighed.  A personal vetting probably wouldn’t be all that useful, anyway, given the circumstances.  These were spies that could fool other spies.  Not people who would have trouble fooling Tucker. 

“But they’re all those heroes, right?” asked Sam.  “Not people that are coming out of nowhere.”

“Except the Russian.  And I’m not sure Dr. Banner really counts as a hero.  Except in, like, the pioneer in the field of science sense.”

“I don’t know,” said Sam, “there were some things on the internet way back.”

“Yeah,” said Tucker.  “I think we can at least be sure Captain America isn’t some kind of sleeper agent.  Or Mr. Stark.  I mean, whatever plan would involve making a really awesome weapons dealer billionaire in their pocket dump the weapons part and give eighty percent of his income to charity and spend his spare time tracking down terrorists and curing malaria would have to be really convoluted.”

“The malaria thing wasn’t actually me—”

“And, like.  Thor’s an alien.  So maybe he’s whatever the space equivalent of nazis is, but at least he’s not an Earth nazi, and—”

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “Tucker, you’re rambling.”

“Right, I don’t think these particular guys are HYDRA.”

“Great,” said Jazz.  “So, what do they actually want?”

“Like I said, they don’t want the, uh, the Avengers to be around the potential nazis.  Probable nazis.  HYDRA agents.  Whatever you want to call them.  But they still need a place to work.  They want that place to be the Ops Center.”

Jazz bit her lip.  She wasn’t enthusiastic about letting a bunch of heavily armed strangers who were buddies with the guy who had shot her into their space.  But while they could use the ops center to track Danny if he was using his powers and capture him with the onboard equipment and shields, if Loki had more people like arrow boy and the weaponry to back them up…  Jazz didn’t think the ops center would do all that well against, say, a grenade launcher.  It wasn’t built with that kind of weaponry in mind. 

For that matter, it wouldn’t do all that well against the GIW if they decided to attack.  They didn’t have Danny to drive them off this time. 

(And Loki had held his ground against Tucker while he was in the full grip of Duulaman.  Danny had trouble with Duulaman.  His power couldn’t be dismissed.)

“How many of them are there again?”

“Five,” said Tucker.  “Not counting arrow guy.  Barton.”

Then they’d outnumber her, Sam and Tucker by two to one.  And three of them were soldiers trained to fight, another could pull a Cujo if he got even the least bit annoyed, one was armed to the teeth, and one was at least the inspiration for a god. 

“Oh!  And Valerie is here.  Not sure why, but.  You know.”

“Well that’s something,” said Jazz.  She wasn’t thrilled about Valerie being involved, and she didn’t know what side she’d come down on in a fight, but…  Yeah.  It was something. 

“She knows.  Actually, all of these guys do.  About Danny.”

Jazz closed her eyes.  She’d known that, but getting it confirmed had a different effect.

There was a way to even those odds, at least a little bit.  She didn’t like it. 

“Where do they want to meet?” she asked. 

Tucker rattled off a set of coordinates.  Jazz started shaking her head before he was done.

“No,” she said.  “Tell them to meet us at Lake Eerie.”

.

“Are you thinking it’s a trap?” asked Sam. 

“No,” said Jazz, “but the GAV still has to follow roads.  Mostly.”

“Oh, no,” said Sam. 

Jazz shrugged.  “We don’t have a lot of options.  Mom and Dad…  I don’t even know what they know.  They’re working for SHIELD somehow, too, so they probably know.”

“They might still be okay with—” She looked at arrow boy.  Barton.  Annoying guy.  Whatever.  “With the whole molecule by molecule thing.  More than okay with it.  We don’t know.  We can’t bring them into this situation.”

“Yeah,” said Jazz, “but they’ll defend us.  We’re the ones who’re here, and to help others you have to take care of yourself.  We can cross any other bridges when we get to them.”

Sam wasn’t so sure about that.  In fact, she was the opposite of sure about that.  “I don’t want them to be in a situation where shooting at Danny while knowing he’s Danny is something they have to do.  I don’t want them…”  She trailed off. 

“I get what you’re saying.  I do.  He’s my brother.  They’re my parents.  But… I don’t think they will.  Not like that.”

“If I can put my two cents in,” called Barton from across the room.

“No,” snapped Sam. 

“I did meet the Fentons.”

“Great,” said Sam, “so have I.  You’re not special.”

“Yes, but I have a bit of an outside perspective.  You know how that goes.  I’ve met Danny, too.”

“Did you shoot him, too?”

“Sam…”

“No, that’s a good point.  But no.  I met them, and the only thing they talked about more than their work was their kids.  Maybe not the best thing to do when you’re being hired by spies, but…”  He shrugged, the motion cut short by the handcuffs.  “They care.”

“That was never in doubt,” said Jazz, as cold as Sam ever heard her. 

“Hey, we’re on the same side, now, right?  I’m just trying to be helpful.  The more comfortable you are, the better.” 

“The better to ambush us, you mean?”

“Still not helpful,” said Jazz.

Sam crossed her arms and tapped her foot.  She was just trying to look at all the perspectives.  Danny loved his parents.  But there were reasons that, despite everything, he hadn’t trusted them.  And anyone who worked with SHIELD could by HYDRA.  Anyone. 

If it were just up to Sam, she wouldn’t work with any of them.  Danny had allies in the Ghost Zone.  If nothing else, his enemies wouldn’t like him being occupied.  They were awfully territorial over him sometimes.  They just had to, you know, make a portal…  travel through the Zone…  hope the portal opened somewhere useful… find the necessary ghosts… convince them to come back… make another portal to a useful place… the porta-portal and Fenton Bazooka portals didn’t last that long, after all. 

Yeah, that was totally doable. 

Absolutely workable despite Jazz’s arrow wound, the assassin/hostage, Sam’s relative inexperience with the technology they had on hand, and the lack of Zone-ready transportation. 

Yeah, right. 

She couldn’t even say all that stuff in her own head without it sounding sarcastic. 

Even if they could do all of that and got an army of ghosts, Loki could bring his army over first.  There was no guarantee that an army of ghosts could beat an army of aliens.  They didn’t even knew how big Loki’s army was, except that he expected it to be able to conquer the planet with it.  They needed backup, regardless.

“Okay.  Fine.  Call them.  We’ll meet up with the superpowered boy band, too.  But you know what people who are used to being in charge are like.  This is going to go wrong, and it’s going to go wrong fast.”

“And then you’ll say I told you so?”

“And then I’ll say I told you so.”

Chapter Text

Lake Eerie wasn’t a random choice.  In addition to being close enough for the GAV to make the trip, if things did go as badly as Sam thought they would, the lake provided a way to escape ground-bound pursuit, and even a temporary respite from enemies in the air. 

It wasn’t widely advertised –because Jazz’s parents didn’t have much opportunity to use it, rather than any desire to keep it secret – but the Ops Center’s carriage could be safely submerged underwater, and even had rudimentary maneuvering capability. 

If that failed… well, Lake Eerie was a thin spot.  Walker’s second incursion was proof of that.  Not to mention the vicious lake monster.  Jazz hoped that SHIELD’s lack of experience with ghosts would make finding them in the woods if they had to flee that way. 

Or, if they got really desperate, they could use the porta-portal or the bazooka.  Try their luck in the Ghost Zone. 

Jazz hoped it wouldn’t come to that. 

The (Fentonworks New and Improved!) radar pinged at about the same time the wireless connection to the GAV came online. 

“So…” said Sam, “I’ll go out, you keep an eye on things in here.”

Jazz nodded, leaning forward to peer out the window in the direction the jet was supposed to come.  So far, she couldn’t see it. 

Considering the way the ‘helicarrier’ had been cloaked, that didn’t mean anything.  She looked back down at the radar.   

“The SHIELD guys should be here first if this is accurate,” she said. 

“Great.  Be ready to take arrow boy hostage.”

“I’ve told you my name,” complained arrow boy.  “I’ve even told you my code name.  You don’t have to call me that.”

Sam snorted and looked over her shoulder on her way out.  “Whatever you say, arrow boy.”

.

“Hey,” said Tucker, without preamble, “remind me what Danny had us take again.”

Sam glanced behind him at the small crowd.  Tony Stark was a lot shorter in person than he looked on TV.  Dr. Banner – a surprisingly common face in Casper High science lessons – was frowning down at a large, screened box in his hands.  Captain America was… Well, it was kind of weird to see the guy who rescued your great-grandparents from death or worse.  She might not exist without him.  Thor was practically indescribable.  What did you even say about a guy like that?  The only woman, who must be Romanov, Black Widow, stayed by their plane, leaning against one of the door supports in a way that looked casual but was anything but.  Valerie stood slightly apart, her suit retracted for the moment, glaring at everyone.

“I think it’s fine,” said Tucker.  “All things considered.”

“All things considered,” repeated Sam. 

“A bunch of the spare portal parts.  The porta-portal.  Shields, for both humans and ghosts.  The ecto-converter.  Some other random parts I can’t remember.  Not anything we usually work with.  Jazz knew what it was.”

Tucker nodded.  “Okay, yeah.  I think I know what he wanted us to do with all of this.”

“So do I,” said Sam.

“I got kidnapped,” pointed out Tucker. 

“We didn’t kidnap you,” said Romanov. 

“You kind of did.”

“Jazz got shot,” countered Sam.

“Speaking of which, where is Barton?”

Sam pointed.  “Inside.”

“Not like him to not come out.”

“That’s because he’s still tied up,” said Sam.  “We wanted to make sure you weren’t going to come guns blazing.  Or with your giant spaceship thing.”

“Well,” said Stark, loudly, “we thought that would be kind of a bad idea with all the spies—Sorry, the spies that were spying on the spies.”

Captain America pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Do you ever stop?”

“Hey, you should be thanking me.  I just—”

“You have no idea what HYDRA is capable of.”

“Um,” said Tucker.  “Can we go in?”

“Yeah, no,” said Sam.  “We’re waiting for someone else.”

“Oh, no,” said Tucker.  “Come on, did you guys really--?”

“Yeah,” said Sam.  “We needed backup.”

“And what am I?”

“Down a staff, it looks like.”

Tucker shot a glare at Romanov.

“You’re not getting it back until I see Barton.  Speaking of equipment, boys, I don’t see anywhere to park our bus on that thing, so you’d better help unload.”

“Can you—Actually, I’m getting a lot of weird readings on this thing—”

“I’m telling you, man, it’s the ectoplasm.”

Banner frowned slightly at Tucker and looked back at his machine even as he wandered back to the jet.  “Gamma radiation makes much more sense.”

“Does it, though?” asked Tucker.  “I mean, like.  Your whole everything…  Radiation shouldn’t really do that.”

“He’s got a point there,” said Tony Stark as he hauled a set of boxes out on a hand trolley.  “The whole… Hulking out thing.  Doesn’t seem to follow conservation of matter—Have you looked into that?”

“In between running from jingoistic lunatics, sure.”

The sound of an engine made everyone turn.  The GAV rounded the corner a few minutes later, turning so sharply that it almost tipped over.  Seconds later, it narrowly missed hitting the jet and pancaking Stark and Banner and disgorged Jack and Maddie, waving guns.

.

The thing was, Sam, Tucker, and even Valerie, to some extent, were used to the Fentons’ antics.  Stark and Banner were not.  Banner, as they had just been discussing, had superpowers activated by adrenaline and an elevated heartrate.  Anger was the main trigger, but fear… Fear worked too. 

It looked like Sam would get to say ‘I told you so’ a lot earlier than she’d thought. 

.

“How often do human… teenagers… have to sleep?”

“Hm?” asked Selvig, dropping the small component he’d been handling with tweezers.  He swore and dove after it. 

“I suppose I should ask how frequently adult humans need to sleep, instead,” said Loki with a sneer and a roll of his eyes. 

“Well,” said Selvig with a chuckle, “usually we try to sleep once a day.  Eight hours is the recommended amount.  But, heh, you know, academics, we don’t really follow the rules, you know?  You know.  Right?  I mean, you’re up there in space and all… Do they have academics in space?”

“Arguably,” said Danny, “all astronauts are academics of some sort or another.  Scientists, right?  Although, the earlier ones were military, so I suppose they weren’t.  But I guess the question is more about whether or not Loki’s people have academics.  Do you have academics?”

Loki turned slightly to look at the boy incredulously.  Danny blinked back up at him.

“Don’t—” Loki cut himself off before he could say something that could be construed as an order and looked back at Selvig who was trying to lower a piece of equipment into a padded carrying case but kept missing the hole in the shaped ‘styrofoam.’  “How often do teenagers need to sleep?”

“About the same?” said Selvig vaguely.  “I think they’re supposed to get more to stay healthy, but I’ve never had children.  Unless you count my students!  Ha!”  He finally got the part into the Styrofoam hole and smiled triumphantly at Loki.  “Fits like a glove!”

Danny leaned forward to peer at the box.  Loki pushed him back. 

Loki could care less about any of his thralls staying healthy, but he needed them to at least last long enough to get his army.  To get the chitauri.  His staff could not keep them awake indefinitely.  Eventually, their endurance would wane and fail.  Or so he had been told. 

The staff, like the army, was a loaner. 

It matched with the rules of magic he was familiar with, however.  No spell was perfect or unbreakable, no matter how powerful the focus, and the realm of dreams was… strange. 

That was the only reason for his concern.  No other. 

“You could always let us sleep, if you’re so worried,” said Danny. “How often do your people need to sleep?  Asgardians, right?  Or are you an Asgardian if you’re adopted?  I mean, you and Thor look alike, but then you guys look like humans, too, and that’s not what I would have expected from aliens, overall.”

Loki rolled his eyes.  Danny was evidently one of those aggravating people who became more talkative with fatigue.  “My father sleeps once a year.”  Well.  The Odinsleep happened once a year.  And Loki was technically a Jotun, not an Asgardian.  But that hardly mattered.  Loki did not need to sleep.  He was not tired.  He had no desire to close his eyes and see—

“Is that your actual dad, or, like, your biological dad?”

Gods did not groan.

.

Jazz seriously hoped they didn’t need anything on that jet, because it didn’t look remotely salvageable after that. 

“Hey!” called Barton.  “What’s going on out there?”

Jazz was having enough trouble trying to trigger the right controls with only one hand.  She didn’t answer.  Could she--?  No, the Ops Center portal generator didn’t work that way.  She couldn’t punch the coordinates for that.  What she could do, however…

She hit the activation button, and the shield sprang into being with the Hulk on one side and everyone else on the inside, Captain America’s shield ding­-ing off the shield in a way that resonated loudly enough to hurt Jazz’s ears.  The Hulk ran into the shield at full speed and rebounded, stumbling back into the lake.  He roared, clearly furious.  Ripples spread across the water. 

… And the Lake Eerie Monster rose from the depths. 

The Hulk whirled and leapt at the new combatant.  The fight sent water splashing, huge waves breaking over the shore.  Jazz hissed, adjusting the shield to keep the water out.  How much air did they have?  Jazz couldn’t remember how much air a person needed.  It was probably enough for at least a little while. 

The fight was impressive.  Jazz could say that even after watching Danny fight so often.  It was also incredibly brutal.  There was no finesse, no form, and there didn’t need to be.  The sheer physical power of the combatants made it redundant. 

She couldn’t help but think that Danny could beat both of them. 

The lake flared with light, visible even through the green-tinted ectoplasmic shield.  When the light cleared, both the ghost and the surprisingly ghost-like man were gone.

“Hey!  Whoa, whoa, whoa!  What was that?  Where’d Banner go?” shouted Iron Man, audible through the external PA system, which meant that he really had to be shouting, because that thing sucked.

Jazz hissed through her teeth.  She hadn’t caused this situation, but she’d certainly been involved in sending one of the preeminent scientific minds of the century to the Ghost Zone.  Not as bad as killing him, sure, but there it was. 

This was a bad day.  This was a bad, bad day. 

Chapter Text

“I guess,” said Sam, “the good thing is that we were planning on going to the Ghost Zone anyway.”

“You were what?” asked Maddie.  She looked sideways at Stark.  “It was my understanding that the problem had to do with aliens.  Not ghosts.  Not our area of expertise, but of course—”

“We’ll beat up anyone that messes with our kids!”  The statement was emphasized by the sound of the bazooka cocking. 

The effect was slightly ruined by Sam’s knowledge that the sound was an entirely unnecessary addition Jack and Maddie had built in.  A flip of a switch could disable it entirely. 

“Ow!” yelped Jazz. 

“Well, if our doctor hadn’t just been zapped into a hell dimension, you’d be getting better care,” said Romanov.

“And if your arrow guy didn’t shoot me, I wouldn’t need medical care.”

“I said I was sorry!” said Barton, who was doing some kind of wrist exercises now that he was no longer tied up.  “I was being mind controlled.”

“Stuff you do while being overshadowed doesn’t count!” agreed Jack. 

“I don’t blame you for shooting me,” said Jazz.  “I am judging you for the whole unsecured interdimensional portal thing and missing the obvious Nazis.”

“They’re not that obvious,” said Romanov. 

“We are wasting time,” said Thor.  “Open your portal to Helheim and retrieve Banner so we can continue our search for my brother.”

“That is the reason Dr. Banner was brought on board,” said Romanov. 

“I’m not sure we do need to search for him,” said Jazz.  “It’s something I’ve been thinking about.  The things Danny wanted from us, I mean.  I’m sure Sam and Tucker have, too.  But, Mom, Dad, you remember the ecto-converter?  How much power could it…”  She shook herself subtly.  “How much power could it extract from a level seven ghost?  How many places can produce that much power?”

“A level seven ghost?  Where would Loki even—” Maddie cut herself off.  “Oh, right.  Phantom.”

“Danny,” corrected Sam.  

Maddie sighed.  “He’d need a power plant.  For a portal like the one he’s creating…”  She trailed off. 

“Didn’t you guys make a portal in your basement?” asked Barton. 

“The Ghost Zone’s different!  It’s always around us, right next to us, even now, and it’s chock full of energy!  Once it connects, it’s—Well, not easy to make it self-sustaining, but it’s doable!” explained Jack.  “But his portal, it goes somewhere in this universe.  Somewhere really far away, right?”  He looked to Thor for confirmation.

“I believe that to be so,” agreed Thor.

Jack pumped his fist.  “Yeah!  So, Loki’s gotta get some power to punch through that difference!”

“But the reason HYDRA and SHIELD wanted the Tesseract in the first place was the power it could produce,” said Captain America.  “Wasn’t it?”  He shot Romanov and Barton a look that wasn’t quite a glare. 

“Oh, yeah, Mr. America, sir!  That thing has loads of power!”

Captain America pointed a finger at Jack.  “Don’t call me that.  It’s Rogers.  Steve.  Even Captain America.  But if the Tesseract has power, then what—"

“Think of it like a potential barrier,” said Stark, who was tinkering with a piece of his armor.  “Or activation energy.  Or, if that’s too scientific for any of you, needing to heat something up, put energy in, before it burns, puts energy out.  Which is technically activation energy.”  He jerked his head sharply to one side.  “So, that checks out.  I don’t suppose he told you where he was going?” he asked Barton. 

“Not really.  The last few days are a bit…  Blurry.  And I didn’t need to know.  What I didn’t need to know, I didn’t ask about.  I mostly remember Loki and Danny arguing about it.  One of the places was apparently pretty heavily populated.”

Natasha paused.  “Fenton—Danny was arguing with Loki?”

“Not real arguments.  More repeatedly stating his opinion.  But he did seem… different from… the rest of us.”

“Well, knowing that might help us rule things out,” said Maddie.  “Beyond that, we can eliminate anything too inconsistent, like wind power.  Probably not hydroelectric, either.  Nuclear?  Coal?”

“I don’t know,” said Stark.  “That doesn’t seem like Loki.  I mean, far as I can tell, there was no reason for him to be walking down the street in the middle of Amity Park.  He was grandstanding.  Whatever he’s doing, he wants to be seen doing it.  He wants an audience.  I know the type.”

“Because you are the type?” asked Romanov. 

“Ha ha, very funny.  I might be a narcissist, but Loki, Loki’s a full-tilt diva.”

“Stark.”

Stark waved Thor off.  “Yeah, yeah, I get it.  He’s still your brother.  But we’ve made him run twice, now.  How’s he going to react to that?”

“Loki has never liked losing.  But then, neither of us has.”

“He wants to beat us.”  He pointed a screwdriver at Thor before turning it on Maddie.  “He wants parades, he wants flowers, he wants monuments with his name plastered—”  He froze. 

“You thought of something?” asked Jazz. 

Stark rubbed his hand over his mouth.  “He’s going to Stark Tower.”

“Great,” said Jazz.  “So we can get going!”

Maddie nodded and turned to the control panel to punch in coordinates.  “But don’t think we forgot what you were saying about going to the Ghost Zone, young lady.”

“It’s not like we were going to hide it from you,” said Sam, exasperated.  “We’re going to go fight an army, right?  So, we’re going to need an army.  We have contacts on the other side, or at least Danny does.”

“I don’t think introducing ghosts to this situation is the right thing to do,” said Maddie. 

“Come on, you can’t think that all ghosts are evil after—”

“Danny’s not a ghost, he’s a unique case—”

“Wow, I can just imagine that conversation going well.  ‘Danny, we only think you’re half evil—”

“Sam!” snapped Jazz.  “That’s not necessary.  Mom, I’ve met some of these people, and if we don’t manage to stop the portal from opening, and everyone on the other side can do stuff like what Loki did when he was fighting Tucker, we’ll need back up beyond a bunch of people with guns.  No offense.”

“None taken,” said Captain Rogers.  “I agree.  We should notify the local police and National Guard—”

“About what, an alien invasion?” asked Stark, whose work on his armor had become notably more frantic.   

“Well, we can’t exactly tell HYDRA.”

“Wait, wait,” said Barton.  “That was real?  That was a real thing?  SHIELD has been infiltrated?”

“Yep,” said Romanov.  “Not the news you wanted?”

“Not really, no,” said Barton. 

“The army,” said Captain Rogers.  “They’re reliable?  You can really get them to come?”

“At least some of them are,” said Jazz.  “The Far Frozen, Dora’s people, the Greeks.”

“And even for the unreliable ones, a lot of them used to live here.”  Tucker shrugged.  “They might still care enough to help.”

“Then we need them.  Dr. Fenton, Dr. Fenton, will you be able to build a portal?”

“Between the porta-portal and the rest of what the kids brought, we should be able to make a stable portal if we start now,” said Maddie. 

“Actually, we don’t need to do that,” said Tucker.  “Not for this part, anyway.  Might need it later, for the actual army.  Can I have my staff back now?”

Romanov frowned deeply, but swung the long, thin bag off her shoulder. 

“Thank you.  I can send a few of us straight to the Zone.”

“Are you okay to use that?” asked Jazz. 

“I can handle it,” said Tucker, notably not yet opening the bag.  “I didn’t go full megalomaniac when I was fighting Loki in Amity Park.”

“You tried to bite me,” said Iron Man.

“I’m sure that’s a common problem,” said Sam, dryly.  “Who’s going?”

“I was thinking me and Val,” said Tucker.

“I will join you,” said Thor. 

“The Ghost Zone isn’t for everyone,” warned Sam.  “It takes some getting used to.  And you kinda need to be able to fly.”

“I can fly, and while I am sure you are both fine warriors—” he inclined his head towards Tucker and Val “—returning Banner to this realm will require strength.”

“Isn’t anyone going to ask me if I want to go?” asked Val.

“Don’t you?” asked Tucker. 

“Sure, but…”  She swallowed.  “Jeez.  This is really happening.  Yeah, I’m going to go.  How do we do this?”

“Just stand near me.  Uh, Mrs. Fenton, where will your portal be in the Ghost Zone?”

“We’ll try to put it near our home portal,” said Maddie.  “But we don’t have a lot of experience with placing portals in specific places in the Ghost Zone.  There hasn’t exactly been a point.”

“Oh!  I’ve got an idea!” exclaimed Jack.  He dove sideways, making Barton jump out of the way and opened a cabinet under one of the dashboards.  “You can use this!”  He chucked a blocky item at Tucker.

“The Fenton Finder?”

“Upgraded!”

“We added a feature to find the Ops Center after it got lost last time,” explained Maddie.  “The signal should be able to work through a portal.”

“Okay,” said Tucker, “got it.”

“Great,” said Captain Rogers.  “You three go.  Fentons, you build the portal—”

“One of us will have to keep the Ops Center on track.  Our autopilot isn’t that good.”

“I can do that,” said Jazz.  “And Sam can tell the rest of you guys what you can expect from fighting Danny.”

“I’m not telling you how to kill him or anything,” warned Sam.  “But his powerset and how to manage ghosts in general…  I can do that.”

“Cool!” said Tucker.  “Now that we’ve agreed on that, can we go now?  You do need to get closer to me, Mr. Thor.  Great.  Now let’s hope Egyptian magic and Norse magic don’t explode on contact or anything like that!”

Val did a double take.  “Wait, what—”

Sand swept over the three of them, leaving a thin layer on the floor. 

Sam clapped her hands together.  “Okay, let’s get started on Ghost Fighting 101!”

“Aw, I want to do Ghost Fighting 101…”

“We’ve got a portal to build, Jack.”

“Oh!  Yeah!  Gotta love portals!”

.

“… And those are the basics,” finished Sam. 

“The basics,” repeated Natasha.  “Okay.  The basics.”

“Hey, fighting people who can turn invisible and intangible isn’t easy,” said Sam, “and Danny’s our heavy hitter.”

“I don’t suppose you have any arrow-type things?”

“I don’t know, but I can take you to the armory.  If you promise not to shoot Jazz again.”

“You’ve got it.”

“And after that, we should all get some rest,” said Captain Rogers.  “Some of us have been awake for over twenty-four hours.”

“Not like an extra hour is going to mean much,” said Stark. 

“You’d be surprised,” said Captain Rogers.  “Soldiers learn to sleep when they can.”

“We’re not soldiers.  These kids we’re relying on?  Especially not soldiers.”

“Hey, it’s us or HYDRA,” snapped Sam. 

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.  I have to work on this, anyway.”  He rapped his knuckles against the faceplate of his helmet. 

.

“Wow,” said Sam, sitting in the copilot’s chair, “that was tiring.  Who knew that assassins were so obsessive about weapons.”

“Literally everyone,” muttered Stark.

“Yeah,” said Jazz, “that tracks.  Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

Stark snorted.  “If anyone is sleeping, I’m a teetotaler.  We saw capsicle go thataway, and no one with that kind of expression on their face is sleeping.  Drinking, maybe.”

“You are a teetotaler, though, aren’t you?” asked Jazz. 

“What?”

“I mean, I know you used to always be in the paper partying, but given everything, I know you’re more responsible than to get drunk when you have direct access to some of the most dangerous weapons in the world.”

“There’s a huge gulf of difference between getting drunk and having drinks now and again.”

“Welp!” said Sam, before Jazz could reply.  She did not need to be in the middle of Jazz trying to expand her ‘billionaires I have interrogated’ list.  “I’m going to go see if anyone is sleeping.”

She walked out of the control room.  The Ops Center was surprisingly large, all things considered.  Or maybe not surprisingly.  It had more or less doubled the size of Fentonworks.  Greater emphasis on more. 

Now, if she were the one sulking around, where would she go?

Observation deck, probably.  Assuming she knew it existed.  She walked through a couple more doors and slid down a ladder.  Sure enough...

Well.  She had wanted to talk to him. 

“Captain Rogers?  Are you okay?  I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“You know,” said Captain Rogers, staring down out the window at the rapidly passing countryside, “one of the first things I used the internet to look up was how the war went.  SHIELD told me, but the joke about military intelligence, that’s an old one.  Books had more.  Went to my own museum exhibit.  Figured out the internet.”  He shifted his hands slightly on the rim of his shield.  “I didn’t like the Neo Nazis, wanted to…” 

“Kill them all?” asked Sam. 

“Something like that.”  He smiled at her, thin and tense.  “I understand why they’re not all in jail.  I don’t like it, but I understand it.  I can… live with it, most of the time.  There’s always going to be bullies.  HYDRA, though?”  He shook his head, not turning his gaze from the window.  “I thought… I really thought we had gotten them.  It just feels like all of it was for nothing.”

Sam shifted her weight, tapping her foot behind her.  “My great-grandparents were from Germany,” she said.  “I’m Jewish.  So, yeah.  Kind of a do the math thing.”  Captain Rogers turned to look at her and she shrugged. 

“Miss, you don’t have to—”

“You’re right, I don’t have to.  But I am.  They, um, they didn’t get out in time.  But they still got lucky.  Sort of.  They were caught about the same time the Kreischberg Facility needed more laborers.  Slaves.  Test subjects.  So, they got sent to Austria.  It’s how they met, actually.  You know, other families have cute stories, but-- Never mind.  They were—The one time I heard it from them, it sounded like they were on the operating tables when you came in.”  She paused to swallow.  “From the beginning, everything you did, it wasn’t for nothing.  If it was, I wouldn’t be here.”

The captain looked up at her. 

“Just, you know, something to think about.  And you really should take your own advice.  Get some rest.”

.

Danny craned his neck, gazing up at the glittering expanse of Stark Tower from the safety of the alleyway.  He’d never seen a building this tall in person.  It was honestly giving him a little bit of vertigo.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Selvig, with a chuckle.  “But that’s nothing to what we’ll have in the next couple of hours.”

The part of Danny that was Fenton giggled along with Selvig.  Phantom, however, was hoping his friends got his messages, such as they were.  Danny as a whole… He had mixed feelings.  Obviously.  “Yeah, I guess not.” 

Loki’s hand dropped onto Danny’s shoulder.  “Enough talking.”

“Right,” said Danny, letting invisibility and intangibility wash over all three of them.  “Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

Predictably, the sand dumped them on top of yet more sand. 

“Oh, jeez,” said Valerie, squirming.  “I think there’s sand in my underwear.”

“The risks of going to the beach.”

“This is not a beach.”

In fact, they seemed to be in the middle of a sweltering wasteland.  Tucker scanned the green and swirling sky for landmarks.  Although things moved frequently in the Ghost Zone, they tended to move together. 

Tucker shrugged.  “It’s sort of a beach.  Beach-like, anyway.  You should suit up.”

Valerie scowled at him, but activated her suit, the red crawling over her limbs.  Before it had finished assembling, Tucker had roughly figured out where they were.

“Far Frozen is the closest.  Unfortunately, Skulker’s Island is closer.”  He pointed at the skull-shaped island.  “We’ll want to avoid him until we have backup, but we might want to swing by later.”

“You’re kidding,” said Valerie.

“Not really.  He’s a pain, but he’s got that weird sense of honor.  He won’t go after Danny when he’s mind controlled.”

“Yeah, but he might go after me.  Or one of you two idiots.  It’s not like Norse gods are common.”  She flicked her hand out towards Thor, then looked at him.  “What is he doing?”

Thor was also surveying the sky, looking grim.  “So…  This is Helheim.”

“Maybe?” said Tucker with a shrug.  “I don’t really know how well your history lines up with mythology, or even if there are, like, other afterlives.  Could be a completely different afterlife.”

“It will be difficult to find Banner here.  I had hoped he would be somewhere nearby.”

Tucker hadn’t.  He was all for giving the guy a good long time to cool down. 

“Well, maybe we can get Skulker to find him for us.  He’s good at that kind of thing.”

“Yeah, if you want him to hunt Dr. Banner down,” said Valerie. 

Tucker turned to look at her.  “You sound very incredulous for someone who came to help me recruit ghosts to fight aliens.”

“And you sound very judgmental for a guy who’s going to be riding shotgun on my hoverboard.”

“Hey, this staff isn’t just for show.  I can fly, too.”

“You what?”

.

“Oh, hey, is that who I think it is?” asked Tucker as they started to angle down into the heart of the Far Frozen.

“It is!” exclaimed Thor, putting on a burst of speed.  “Banner!” 

Dr. Banner jumped, partially dislodging the thick fur blanket the yeti’s had draped around his shoulders.

Well.  That was easier than expected. 

“Don’t startle me,” he said.  “Did you not see what just happened?”  He stressed the words, but the rest of him was a picture of practiced calm. 

“Now, now,” said Frostbite, “I think you have a much better handle on your condition than you think.”

Dr. Banner responded by rubbing his face.  “Everything about this week is so…  How did you even get here?”

“Magic,” said Tucker, raising his staff.  “And Valerie’s hoverboard.”

“And my hammer!  It’s good to see you, Dr. Banner!”

“You’re a doctor!” exclaimed Frostbite.  “Why didn’t you say so?  We’re always thrilled to meet fellow healers.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Banner.  “Um.  I didn’t realize you were…”

“The Far Frozen has some of the best doctors in the Realms,” said Tucker. 

“We like to think so, certainly!  Are you here to pick up your friend?  Will the Great One be joining us as well?”

“Er, about that.  We need your help…”

.

Stark Tower was in that strange architectural limbo between ‘almost finished’ and ‘move-in day.’  Sure, such a big building in such a big city would have people moving in as it was finished, not just after the finishing touches, but it was far from full.  The top, private, floors were the only ones that were entirely fit for habitation.  Most floors lacked furniture, finished paint and other decor, and key wall and ceiling panels.

And, therefore, people. 

Ground floor security was easy to take out.  From there, it was just a matter of getting the portal set up.  Wires put in place.  Final touches on the portal device.  Alignment.  Breaking into Tony Stark’s private bar. 

“Are you sure you should be doing that before a battle?” asked Danny. 

“We do not become intoxicated nearly so as quickly as you humans.”

He paused, digesting that.  “Do Asgardians get alcohol poisoning?”

“No,” said Loki.

Too bad.  That meant Danny couldn’t cause mischief by knocking bottles out of Loki’s hand to protect him from the evils of alcohol. 

“This is really quite good for a human brew,” mused Loki. 

Danny shrugged.  He wouldn’t know.

A streak of red and gold outside the window caught Danny’s eye.

“They’re here,” he said.  “At least one of them.”

“Wait for him,” ordered Loki.  “I am sure we will not have to wait long.”

.

Tony flew by the tower again, this time spotting Loki through the windows, leaning against his bar.  With the portal device having reached the point of being self-sustaining (despite him and the Fentons both believing it wouldn’t get to that point just yet), it looked like he might have to go to Plan B.  Or C.  Honestly, he’d lost track at this point. 

He landed on the platform, past where the gauntlet would have activated.  He didn’t want to strip this armor.  Even if it was a bit banged up, it was the only set he’d modified to deal with ghosts.  With Fenton. 

Now, if the aliens started showing up, he might have different priorities. 

He glanced upwards at the portal device at the top of the tower.  Nothing yet.  The Fentons had assured him that he’d know for sure when it was finally activated. 

He walked in. 

“Please,” drawled Loki, “tell me you're going to appeal to my humanity.”

“Uh,” said Tony, improvising.  “Actually, I’m planning to threaten you.”

“Really,” said Loki.  “That explains why you’ve kept your armor on.”

“Hm, yeah, I know, not very hospitable of me.  I’d offer you a drink, but it looks like you’ve already made yourself at home.”

“Stalling me won't change anything.”

“Oh, I know, I know.  But I’m not stalling.  I’m threatening!  By the way, you doing okay over there, kid?” asked Tony.

Fenton gave him two thumbs up and a dopey grin.  “Copacetic.”

“Practicing for your SATs there, kid?”

“Nah, I’d use something like superlative or splendid if I was doing that.”

“Right,” said Tony.  “Anyway, you sure are drinking a lot.  Having second thoughts?”

Loki rolled his eyes.   “What is there to have second thought about?  The Chitauri are coming, and nothing can change that.  What do I have to fear?”

That… sounded weirdly resigned. 

“The Avengers?”

Fenton snorted.  “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, that just sounds like the name for an edgy boy band.  Do you have matching outfits.”

They didn’t, thank God.  Teenagers were brutal.  “You won’t be laughing when you’re up against the rest of the team.  Earth’s mightiest heroes.”

“Well, yeah, you’ve got to save your air for breathing in a fight.  Hey, Loki, can I call you Loki Ono?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Come on, she’s famous for breaking up a band.”

“No.”

“We’re not the Beatles, kid.”

“Yeah, if you were musicians, I’d actually be scared.”

“What, and you’re not scared of the demi-god, the super soldier, the Hulk, and a pair of master assassins?  All of whom your boss has managed to piss off?”  At least partially by kidnapping Fenton, but that was beyond the point. 

“Not really,” said Fenton as Loki continued to sip Tony’s top-shelf… actually, no, wait, that was the mead.  Why did Tony even have mead?  “Not even sure what a Hulk is in this context.  That’s not the name of your helicarrier thing, is it?  Because if so, yikes.  Might as well call it Titanic II.”

“Okay, fine, you’re a teenager, you’re not scared of anything.  What about your parents?  And what’s his excuse?  Kinda sucks to be hiding behind a kid, man.”

“Enough,” said Loki.  “I have an army.”

“We have a Hulk.”

“Do you?”  Loki smirked, then stalked forward until he was standing just outside of Tony’s reach.  “For all your talk of allies, you are awfully alone up here.  Tell me, have they abandoned you and whatever ill-formed plan you have to, what, exactly?  Save a few more lives?  Stave off the… inevitable?”

“You’re missing the point.  There’s no version of this where you come out on top.  Maybe your army comes.  Maybe it’s too much.  Maybe you win the day.  But that’s as far as it goes, because what we can’t protect, we’ll avenge.”

Loki regarded him coolly.  “Vengeance, is it?”

“I consider it more balancing the scales of justice.”

“And do you think this world is in balance?”  Loki laughed, the sound slightly hysterical.  “There are those who would disagree with you!”

The tower shuddered, just slightly.  Tony twisted to see a beam of light pushing its way into the sky.  So much for his hope that Loki would have to do something to the portal to make it work.  But that had only been Plan G. 

“Take care of him.”

Tony turned back to see Fenton directly between himself and Loki.  The boy smiled the kind of smile that wouldn’t be out of place on an exhausted child actor.  Cherubic and unhinged. 

“Speaking of vengeance, I never did pay you back for what you did to Tucker, did I?”

He put his hand flat against Tony’s chest and shoved. 

.

This was one of those good news, bad news situations.  Only, it also had a worse news category. 

Good news: Mr. Stark, Iron Man, whatever, had added ghost countermeasures to his armor. 

Bad news: They hurt. 

Worse news: They didn’t hurt nearly enough to stop Danny. 

Good news: Loki seemed to be processing some of the cognitive dissonance that had (presumably) been shoved down his throat via mind control. 

Bad news: There wasn’t any more time for him to process it.

Worse news: Even if this fight turned out the way they hoped, Loki would probably be killed for what he’d done. 

Good news: Selvig had successfully put a couple of really nasty fail-safes into the design of the portal device. 

Bad news: No one that wasn’t mind-controlled knew about them. 

Worse news: There was an alien army descending on the streets of New York, and despite all his hinting, it looked like his ghost army plan had fallen through. 

Millions of people could die today. 

Danny would be, at least partially, responsible. 

But there wasn’t time to contemplate any of those problems, because being thrown through a window didn’t really stop a guy with jet boots. 

Iron Man shot a volley of ectoblasts at Danny.  The mechanism for the blasters seemed to be shielded, or at least notably altered from his parents’ original designs, so he couldn’t steal the spark from it like he’d been able to do with the SHIELD agents in Germany.  That was fine.  Danny deflected half of them and snatched the other half out of the air before throwing them back, pushing Iron Man further away from the window. 

Please let him decide the aliens were the bigger threat.  Danny didn’t want to be stuck fighting him. 

Luckily, his prayers seemed to be answered.  Iron Man pulled away, spiraling to meet a flight of small alien ships.  Danny watched him for a moment before turning and following Loki out to the balcony. 

“Now what?” he asked.

“Now we wait,” said Loki. 

.

The Ops Center threaded its way between skyscrapers.  “Not a lot of places to park, here, guys,” said Jazz, glancing over her shoulder in hope of guidance.  “Someone’s going to have to give me more directions soon.”

“Just keep following that light,” said Captain America, shrugging on a backpack of some sort.  “You’ll want to wait until you’re as close as possible to turn on the ghost portal.”

Jazz did a doubletake.  “Is that one of the emergency parachutes?  I don’t know when they were last checked—”

“They’re from the quinjet,” said Black Widow, striding by with a parachute of her own.

“But—”

“We’re hoping you can park us on a skyscraper, don’t worry,” said Barton. 

“Easy for you to say,” grumbled Sam. 

“I don’t know, you’re the one with a jet pack.”

“I’m the one that knows how to use a jet pack.  And I’m staying with the Ops Center, anyway.”

Something Jazz was glad for.  The Ops Center was great, but it would be a sitting duck once it was parked and acting as a platform for the portal, and she, well, she had an arrow hole in her shoulder.  Not great for the whole fighting thing.  Or even really for flying. 

This injury would definitely have repercussions later in life, which was something she was trying not to think about too much right now. 

“Oh, what is that?  Is that a space whale?” asked Sam, leaning forward over Jazz’s shoulder. 

It did in fact look like a space whale. 

“I don’t know,” said Jazz.  “Should I put down?”

“We’ll want our portal as close as possible, sweetie!” called Maddie from somewhere in the depths.  “Keep going!”

“We’re not quite done with it yet, anyway!” yelled Jack. 

Black Widow hissed something in Russian.  Jazz reciprocated the sentiment.  They didn’t really have time. 

But what they had would have to be enough.  The radar screen lit up, beeping urgently. 

“We have fliers inbound.”

“Great,” said Black Widow.  “Let’s see if we can’t get a couple.”

.

Natasha stood next to Barton and watched as Captain Rogers cranked open the lower hatch, then tapped her earpiece.  “You’ll have to get us over them and slow,” she said.  “Still think you can do that?”

“I said I could,” said Jasmine Fenton. 

Natasha almost rolled her eyes.  Teenagers.  Except she’d never been quite like that.  Never got the chance. 

(She couldn’t help but think that Jasmine Fenton would have made a great Widow.  She already had ignoring pain down.)

“Hold on tight, everyone.  Ride’s about to get bumpy.”

The Ops Center tipped upward suddenly, forcing everyone to grab onto the handrails, and accellerated. 

“So, uh,” shouted Barton over the wind, “I don’t think we actually discussed how we’re going to do this!”

“That’s because we’re not!  I am!”

“Oh, that really makes me feel a lot better!”

“Contact in five, four, three—”

The rest of Jazz’s countdown was cut off by the impacts of the chitauri’s weapons on the Ops Center shield.

“Be ready to cut shielding!”  She saw black-brown outside the window, getting closer.  “Now!”

She jumped.  Free fall lasted less than a second and then she was bringing her knee down on an alien helm.  She twisted, kicked, and grabbed the handlebars.  Time to see whether or not these aliens thought similarly enough to humans to design vehicles in a way she could understand.  Not at all guaranteed, given that American and Russian vehicles often felt like they were made on two different planets. 

But that was what the parachute was for. 

It was fine. 

She pulled back, the vehicle arcing, reversing course.  Great. 

“Bringing it back around.”

“Great, tell me when you need me to let you in.”

“The portal is ready,” chimed in Maddie Fenton.  “Should we activate now, or…?”

“See the building at our two o’clock?” asked Captain America.

“Yeah?”

“Anchor there.  Hawkeye, is that a good enough position for you?”

“I can make it work.”

“Great,” said Natasha.  “Captain, get ready for pickup.”

“Roger that.”

.

Jazz pulled a lever and felt a jolt as two thick Fenton Cables hit the roof of the building under them, securing the Ops Center as much as it could be away from its home base on top of Fentonworks. 

“Ready, sweetie?”

Jazz locked eyes with the spindly, monster-spewing white tower extending upwards from Tony Stark’s skyscraper.  At this range, she could see small figures moving around on the roof of the building. 

“Yeah, ready,” she said.  “Ops Center secure.”

The lights flickered, and a high-pitched whine emanated from belowdecks.  Then, from right beneath where Jazz’s pilot seat, a horizontal beam of bubbly green shot out before splashing against nothing, only meters away from the Tesseract portal beam.  She twisted her controls, changing the Ops Center’s bearings and sweeping their portal beam further away from the other portal beam.  She didn’t know what crossing them would do, but she didn’t want to find out. 

The end of the ectoplasmic beam twisted, trembled, flexed, and a vibrantly green portal swirled into existence. 

“Guess we’re just waiting on Tucker, now,” said Sam. 

“Or on Danny,” replied Jazz, grimly.  The figures on the roof had stopped moving. 

She was quite certain one of them was her brother. 

.

“What in the Nine Realms is that?” demanded Loki. 

“A ghost portal,” said Danny. 

Loki bared his teeth and visibly started to grind them.  “One of your parents’ creations?”

“Most likely.”

“Do you know how to disable it?”

“Probably, yeah.  Are you going to tell me to do it?”  If he did, and if Loki was clever about his wording, Danny would have to hope that his nature as a ghost would be able to overpower the mind control in at least this specific instance. 

Loki glared down at him.  “No,” he said.  “You’re staying with me.  Let them play with their toys.  They will be no match for the chitauri.”

.

“… And that’s why we need your help.”

Pandora nodded gravely.  “I see,” she said.  “We will join you.  An invasion of Earth affects all of us, even here.  I will send one of my fastest messengers to the Dragon Kingdom, so you may lead us to the portal at once.”

“Er, problem,” said Tucker.  “There is no portal yet.  It’s—”

The Fenton Finder beeped.  He pulled it up from where it hung on his belt, scanning the screen.

“Never mind,” he said.  “Portal’s right this way.”

Chapter Text

Sand swirled on the flight deck. 

“I thought I told you not to do that while I’m driving!” snapped Jazz.

“It’s an emergency.”

Jazz twisted to look at Tucker.  “What, did something go wrong with--?”

“No, that’s all fine.  This, though?”  He pointed at the alien-spewing portal.  “This is an emergency.  Backup’s still got a ways to go before they reach the portal.  I came to scout things out.”

“How long is ‘a ways?’” asked Sam. 

“I don’t know.  You know how distances can get in there.  Maybe fifteen minutes?  I can pull a couple of people over with me at a time, like with Thor here, but—”

“Thor came with you?” interrupted Jazz. 

“Yeah, he’s—What the heck, how did he do that?  He’s huge.”

“Never mind that,” said Sam.  “Are you okay to keep using the staff like that?”

“I’m fine.  I’ve been managing my jerkish urges by being low-key kind of a jerk to Valerie.”

“That doesn’t sound like managing them at all, actually.”

“I’m fine.”

He didn’t sound fine.  But then, who was?  Not Jazz. 

“How’s the shield setup going?” continued Tucker, not giving Jazz a chance to dispute his statement. 

“Not great,” said Sam.  “Romanov got ahold of one of those bikes and we’re trying to get the generators set up on nearby buildings, but—” She summarized the rest of the technical problems (explosions, enemy forces, skyscraper roofs being really far apart) with a shrug. 

It really was too bad that Loki’s portal was so far up, and that they didn’t dare bring the Ops Center closer.  Then, they could have tried to encircle the portal with the Ops Center shield. 

But the blimp was not a match for space whales.  Or whatever those things actually were.  And they were still unclear on what forces Loki had in the building. 

Apart from Danny, who, really, was more than capable of drilling a hole through an unshielded Ops Center.

“How can I—Oh, heck.  He isn’t.”

“Isn’t what?” asked Jazz, trying to see what Tucker was so upset about.  She leaned forward and flinched as a gust of hot, sandy air scraped along the back of her neck.  “I hate that.”

“There!” said Sam, pointing. 

There was someone new on the roof of Stark Tower.  Two someones.  Thor, and now Tucker. 

“Oh, no, they’re both idiots,” said Jazz.  Her dramatic, tension-filled reunion with a mind-controlled family member could wait.  Why couldn’t Thor’s?

One of the computer banks beeped.  “We have incoming,” said Sam.  “Ten o’clock.”

“I see them,” said Jazz, spotting the small formation.  But the Ops Center didn’t have any power to spare.  All it had was going into the portal and the shields. 

“Should I go out?” asked Sam. 

“No way,” said Jazz.

“I have a bazooka.  And a jetpack.”

“That’s not—”

Something small and narrow arced upward into the lead glider, then exploded.   

“Oh, yeah,” said Sam.  “I’d forgotten about arrow boy.”

.

“Loki!  Turn off the Tesseract or I’ll destroy it!”

“Brother!” exclaimed Loki.  “Come, drink with me!  For the dawn of a new and more balanced age!”

Danny did not like that emphasis on balanced.  It sounded like something out of someone else’s mouth.   And Loki had said it, or something like it, before, to Iron Man, hadn’t he?  But Danny had other concerns at the moment.  “Hey,” he said, by way of greeting.  “So, before we start, is he drunk enough to be actually impaired?  He keeps telling me Asgardians are different and all, but I’m not super clear if he’s actually an Asgardian, like, species-wise, culturally, obviously, I mean.  Is he drunk?”

“What?” asked Thor. 

“Look, I haven’t slept in…  I just haven’t.  So.  Words.  Forget them.”  He pointed at Loki.  “Drunk?”

“I’m not drunk,” said Loki.  “I am merely showing Thor some hospitality.”

Thor scowled at them and turned his hammer on the Tesseract.  Naturally, it bounced off the shield, and Thor flew backward several meters. 

“Should I have warned him?” asked Danny.  He was sort of annoyed that Thor hadn’t at least answered the question about alcohol. 

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” said Loki, draining another shot of alcohol.  “He never listens to me when I tell him things, anyway.”

“That might be because you’re sort of unhinged.”

“Oh, yes, so unlike SHIELD and Fury, using an infant as a soldier.”

A gust of sand blew over the roof, revealing Tucker. 

“Oh, hi, Tuck!” said Danny, waving.  “Here all by yourself?”

Tucker looked up, red flashing behind his glasses as he wobbled.  “A son of Ra never walks alone.  Wadjet rests upon my brow, Nekhbet shelters me with her wings.”

Oh, that didn’t sound good. 

“Finally,” said Loki.  “Someone who can give me a decent fight.”  He threw the glass aside and walked forward, only to be stopped by Thor. 

“No, brother,” said Thor.  “If you fight, you fight with me.”

“Well, sounds like it’s just you and me, then,” said Danny, pleasantly unsure about his odds against Tucker given their respective current states.  Ice crackled under his feet even as the air grew dry and desert-like.  To their side, Loki and Thor fought with more traditional means. 

Captain America and Black Widow zoomed by the tower on a stolen chitauri glider.  Both Danny and Loki noticed at the same time and turned to fire – Danny hoping Tucker would take advantage of the distraction, Loki for who knew what, considering he was still in the middle of a rather nasty sibling brawl, complete with hair pulling on both ends.

Thor tackled Loki and the bolt from the scepter missed.  Danny’s ectoblast didn’t.

.

It was only a slight graze, one that barely made the chitauri bike shudder, but it must have gone through something important, because although they weren’t in freefall, Steve and Natasha soon found themselves in a steep spiral.

Steve prepared to grab Natasha and jump.  Bleeding off even a little momentum meant a lot in these situations. 

But before they got close enough to the ground to do so, sand blasted up, buoying them up with enough force for Natasha to get more control and set them on the street in one piece even as individual grains of sand scored lines in their protective gear and sometimes their skin.  The sandstorm died down, revealing a street full of enemies, Stark Tower looming high above them, and other bikes hurtling towards the ground and exploding into fireballs.  The sandstorm had, apparently, been too much for them.  The street itself was, and there was no good way to say this, brutally shredded.  Not a single window on the block still had glass in it.  Was that where all the sand had come from?

The portal disgorged another huge creature, flanked by fliers.  Steve could spot what looked like hundreds of soldiers on it, made tiny by distance. 

“Well, plan A is screwed,” said Natasha, as they prepared to fight.  “What now?”

Steve touched his communicator – the Fenton Phone – then turned to slam a chitauri soldier into the ground.  He tossed the weapon to Natasha.  “Fentons,” he said, “we’ve been shot down.  Can you make a shield around the portals with the generators we’ve already dropped?”

“No can do, Cap!” shouted Jack Fenton.  “Any shield we could make right now would miss it by a mile!  Geometry’s all wrong!”

Steve looked up the tower again, casually deflecting an energy blast from one of the Chitauri.

“What’re you thinking?” asked Natasha. 

“What if we got some of the generators up on top of Stark Tower?”

“That might work,” said Maddie Fenton.  “We’re going to have to do some very fast and dirty math to get everything working, but I think it might work…”

There were screams – civilians – down the street, and Steve’s whole body twitched towards them.

“Give me the generators,” said Natasha, acquiring another weapon as her first one seemed to run out of charge.  “You go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.  Given how big Stark Tower is, and how many people Loki probably had, sneaking through that place is more my thing, anyway.”

“And I can give you some tips!” said Stark, who had, of course, been listening in.

“Alright,” said Steve, already planning on how best to organize a civilian retreat.  He tossed the pack of shield generators to Natasha, who caught them easily. 

“Don’t die!” she said. 

“Don’t plan on it!”

.

Tucker jerked his staff sideways with a gasp, and that was enough of an opening for Danny.  He stepped forward, smoothly, winter in his wake, sliding past the not-quite-real vulture and snake that had faded into being around Tucker. 

Duulaman had given Danny a lot of trouble the first time around, throwing constructs in his path and warping reality as he saw fit.  But there was a lot to be said about experience. 

He grabbed Tucker’s wrist and squeezed.  The snake sunk its teeth into Danny’s shoulder.  They all hissed.  Danny looked into Tucker’s red eyes, and wondered if the color of his eyes was just as jarring to Tucker. 

Then, the red flared brighter and Tucker—

Tucker dropped the scepter.  The red in his eyes vanished immediately. 

“No, no, no, I can’t do that,” said Tucker, whose skin had taken on a clammy, sickly cast.  “No, nope, not doing that, oh my gosh—”

Danny grabbed the scepter and tossed it over the edge of the building.  Which was… okay, that could have gone better.  

“Sorry,” said Danny.

“Crap,” said Tucker, but he wasn’t a threat any longer, so Danny let him go.  He had his orders. 

Protect Loki. 

“Loki!” shouted Thor, even as Danny pushed him away and called up a shield.  “Look at this! Look around you! You think this madness will end with your rule?”

“It’s too late,” said Loki, voice cracking.  “It’s too late to stop it.  Any of it.”

“The army isn’t ours,” reminded Danny, helpfully, looking back.  He could see the knife between Loki’s fingers. 

The sounds of battle seemed to swell.  The shadow of one of the huge space whales passed overhead. 

“Get me out of here,” whispered Loki.

“Got it,” said Danny, and he pulled them both off the side of the building. 

.

Tucker didn’t know how much more of this his heart could take.  First, Captain America and Black Widow going down, then the sudden fear that he’d killed them with that glass sandstorm, then Danny getting the scepter from him and tossing it off the roof, and now Danny and Loki were skydiving without parachutes.

Please let them not have pancaked on the ground.  He knew Danny could tap his flight a little, even in human form, but there was still that fear.

“Call back your staff!” called Thor.  “We must go!”

“Wh—I don’t know what you can do with your hammer, but I can’t just call back that thing,” said Tucker.  “It’s probably broken into a million pieces on the sidewalk by now!”  And good riddance, honestly.  He could still feel something in the back of his head.  Something nasty. 

“Have you ever tried?  Tools like that tend to return to their rightful owners,” said Thor, taking a few steps towards him.  “I do not pretend to know what you are going through with this ‘past life’ of yours, but you can control it.  Just as Banner controls his anger, or any mage of my people controls the power that flows through them.  And you must.  This city depends on us.”

“Oh, no pressure, then,” said Tucker. 

“Good man.”  Thor patted him on the shoulder and then jumped off the building.  Great!  Great.  It wasn’t like there was any other way for him to get off this roof, what with Loki’s other forces in the building.  He was stuck on the roof alone!

“Ughhhh.”

Or maybe not so alone.  He pulled his emergency lipstick out of his pocket.  Not the best weapon against humans – and he had no idea what it would do to aliens – but it was better than nothing.  And how arrogant had the staff made him, that he didn’t think to get something more robust from the Ops Center before leaving? 

Near the portal device, an old man was sitting up, holding his head.  “Ugh, oh, no.  Oh, no.”  He stared up at the portal in awe and horror. 

“Hey,” said Tucker. 

The man jumped.  “Who’re you?”

“Who’re you?”

They stared at each other for a moment. 

“… are you pointing a tube of lipstick at me?”

He had pretty good eyesight for such an old guy. 

“It’s a deadly laser,” said Tucker.  Well.  It was a laser, and it did have an association with death, via ghosts, so.  It wasn’t like he was lying.  “Are you one of Loki’s people?  Did you help make this?”

“I—Not of my own will.”  The man got to his feet shakily.  “I was—The scepter.  You can’t—You can’t protect against yourself.”

“I know the feeling,” said Tucker.  “You know any way to shut it off?”

The man nodded, slowly.  “Yes.  Yes, we did.”

“You and Danny?”

“All of us.  Loki…  There’s something very wrong with Loki.”

“Cool.  So.  How do we do it?”

“We need Loki’s staff.”

.

After they’d fallen a few stories, Danny flipped them into the building.  Whatever Tucker had done had taken out all the glass, leaving Stark Tower, with its ultra-modern design, missing much of its outer walls.  Loki landed easily, which maybe, maybe supported his position that he wasn’t drunk. 

Maybe. 

He also caught Danny by the arm when he stumbled.

“What’s wrong with you?” he snapped. 

“Uh.  Not sleeping in days.  What’s wrong with you?”

Loki scoffed.  “Hide us,” he ordered. 

Danny turned them invisible.

“So… What now?”

“I should be leading this army,” said Loki, looking out into the city, his eyes slightly unfocused even as Thor swooped down from the roof and back out into battle.  “I should be directing them—They should be hunting down these heroes, not wasting time with humans that aren’t even warriors.”

Danny swallowed.  Loki was right – right both ways, actually.  The way the chitauri were fighting was stupid, but it wasn’t stupid enough.  Fewer people would get hurt if they were focused on people who could take it.  Except…  “You do know it isn’t your army, right?  You do—What happens,” Danny tried, a bit desperately, “when your boss comes through that portal?”

Loki froze.  His breathing went shallow.  “No, no, no,” he said.  “That was not our bargain.  I will deliver the Tesseract and the scepter to him.  He has no reason… no reason…” 

“What did he do to you?” pushed Danny.  If he knew it was something bad, then maybe…

Loki shook his head.  “I need to take command.”  His voice was flat, lifeless. 

“Okay,” said Danny.  “Elevator or stairs?”

Green light flared from above, and they both strode to the edge of the floor to look up. 

.

“We’ve got increased energy influx, kiddos!” said Jack over the Ops Center intercom.  “Get ready to adjust for momentum bleed-off, Jazzypants!”

“Right, right, right,” said Jazz, making sure she had a good grip on the controls.  If this wound up being a thing where they had codenames printed in the newspaper, and hers wound up being Jazzypants, she’d be committing some crimes. 

“Wait, what does he mean momentum bleed-off?” asked Sam, who had noticed what controls Jazz had and was now buckling herself in. 

“Ever notice that you slow down when you go through a portal?”

“Sped up a few times, too.”

“Well, that energy goes somewhere, so—”

The Ops Center lurched, and Jazz steadied it in the air, running the engines just enough to keep them in place.  The anchor was all very well and good, but it had limits, too. 

A familiar figure, smaller than the space whales but, but still huge, with a weapon held in each of her four hands, emerged from the portal, trailing dozens of smaller glowing dots. 

“Yes!” shouted Sam.  “They made it!”

And then the shield cut out. 

“Uh, we might have underestimated the juice the portal would take when actively transmitting.  Just a bit.”

Chapter Text

“Oh, thank God,” said Tony, “Bruce is here.”  All the other green, angry looking people were secondary, as far as he was concerned.  Having the Hulk on hand meant that he didn’t have to play Jonah again.  That had been.  Unpleasant.

A dart of red broke off the crowd of ghosts and angled towards Tony.  Valerie Gray.  And Bruce, too.  As Bruce. 

“Where do you want us?” shouted Valerie. 

“Take your pick!” shouted Tony, even as he lined up more shots.  He was going to be running out of all but the special anti-ghost ordinance soon.  “But—Bruce, you’re going to have to suit up.”

“Of course,” said Bruce, rubbing his face.  “Yeah.  Okay.  You would call it that.  Miss Gray, if you could take me up towards one of those…  big things…”  He gestured vaguely at the space whales.

“Cool!” said Tony, giving them a thumbs up.  “Now, all we need to do is get a shield around the portals, and we can roll up the streets.  No problem!”

“Sir,” said Jarvis.  “You may want to look at the Ops Center.”

What was going on now?  He turned and watched the shield around the airship flicker once, twice, and then go out completely.  The chitauri, who apparently were smart enough to smell blood in the water, regardless of any other tactical deficiencies, changed direction. 

“Well, that’s not good.  Anyone want to fill me in on what’s going wrong?”

“Well,” started Jasmine Fenton. 

.

“What happened to the thing being self-sustaining?” demanded Natasha as she punched out another mercenary.  Where had Loki even found these guys?  They weren’t even mind controlled.  Who in their right mind signed up to fight for the aliens in a literal alien invasion?

“Listen,” said Maddie Fenton, a little testily, “we quite literally built it on the fly.  It isn’t operating at peak theoretical efficiency, but it’s a testament to Jack’s engineering skills that we got it to work at all, much less while also trying to come up with a workable solution for the shields.  Be glad we have enough power to keep the portal open, even.”

“Forget the shields,” interrupted Tucker, his voice crackling slightly.  The Fentons’ communicators weren’t bad, and apparently they worked through the ‘spectral noise’ associated with ghosts, but they left something to be desired in comparison to the crystal-clear communications Natasha had gotten used to while working for SHIELD.  “Well, no, don’t forget them, forget them, we might still be able to—I’ve got— What’s your name again, dude? —I’ve got Selvig up here, and he says that if we can get Loki’s staff, we can shut down his portal.”

“Great!” shouted Steve.  “Anyone have eyes on Loki?”

.

The answer to that was, of course, a resounding no. 

.

“Oi, Tucker, you want to run by that thought you had about the shields again?”

Under other circumstances, Tucker might have been over the moon.  Tony Stark, asking him about something technical!  It was like a dream come true! 

But between the mind control, the alien invasion, and whatever was going on with SHIELD and HYDRA, Tucker’s enthusiasm for anything was pretty much nil.  So. 

“Uh,” said Tucker.  He and Selvig were standing in front of Loki’s portal device.  Well.  Tucker was sort of crouching, and Selvig was… sprawled.  That couldn’t be a good position for a guy that old, but whatever.  “So, Loki got the startup power for this thing from the, uh, the tower’s arc reactor, right?  So, it’s still plugged in.  The connection is live, and it looks like he used standard connectors.  Not, you know, a twelve-gauge extension cord, but Earth-made.  I think maybe we can use it to charge up the shields and use one here as the centerpiece – the power source – instead of the one in the Ops Center.  If it’s, like compatible.  Is that a thing we can do?  Mrs. Fenton?”

“Well, it isn’t impossible,” she said.  “But those portable shield relays – they weren’t made as independent shield generators, and for them to run on something other than ectoplasm – Jack, sweetie, do we still have those blueprints? – Thanks.  Alright, Tucker, you’ll have to make significant adjustments to the shield relay, probably even cannibalize one of them.  Are you able to do that?”

“Well,” said Tucker.  “Maybe?  I’ve got a lipstick laser and…”  He looked over his shoulder.   “Selvig.  Sort of.  But if it’s anything more complicated than rewiring the Speeder’s main gun to fire from the backseat window console, I’m going to need a bunch of tools and a science guy who isn’t dead on his feet.  No offense.”

Selvig waved him off. 

“You’re the one who—?  Never mind.  It is more complicated.  Quite a bit more complicated.”

“I’ll also need, you know, the generators.  Relays?”

“I’m still on my way,” said Romanov.  She sounded… upset.

“And so am I,” said Iron Man.  “Kid, I’ve got all sorts of tools in my apartment.  And dummy, too.”

Okay.  Cool.  Also, what did dummies have to do with anything?  Was that rich people code for something?

“Okay, want to give me directions, or am I supposed to just start pulling out drawers?”

.

“Hey!  Where’re you going?”

“You need more cover,” said Sam.  “This is what I have the jetpack for, remember?  Arrow boy isn’t going to get all of them, and they do have ranged weapons.”

It was true, one well-aimed shot through the Ops Center envelope could send the whole thing down.  They weren’t using hydrogen gas, of course, but an ectoplasm-nitrogen mix, so there was no danger of becoming Hindenburg Mk II, unless the aliens’ energy weapons reacted really badly with ectoplasm, but there hadn’t been any evidence of that yet, so…

Anyway, it didn’t matter.  Jazz was too busy keeping the Ops Center and the portal steady to do much else. 

“Be careful,” she said. 

“Can’t make any promises!”

.

Fury was having a bad day.  A really, monumentally, bad day.  One that was part of an already awful week but still managed to go above and beyond in terms of how completely awful it was. 

Primarily, he blamed HYDRA.  They were very easy to blame and were, in his opinion, responsible for at least seventy percent of the metric ton of crap he was currently wading through. 

But then, then he got a call. 

The call. 

Which meant that he had to take this boat riddled with snakes to fight off an alien invasion over New York.  Peachy. 

If ever he’d been tempted to give old friends a call…  But he wouldn’t.  Not yet. 

“Sir,” said Coulson, joining him smoothly as he walked down the hallway toward the main bridge. 

“What’d you find?”

“We have problems, sir.  Using the head start we were given, I’ve found no less than seventy problem areas on this ship… and some indications that the World Security Council may have similar issues.  We also have to assume there are unseen variables at play.”

Fury did not miss a step.  Benefit of being a cynical bastard.  The WSC was a shock, and a disaster on multiple levels, but the other number was… livable.  “Are there any particular personnel involved in these problems?”

“STRIKE teams seem to have an unusually high number of incidents.  Upwards of ninety percent.”

Fury strode onto the bridge.  “Tell the STRIKE teams to prepare to mobilize and pilots to scramble.”  Uriah gambits were unpleasant… but if he could kill two birds with one stone, he would, and he wouldn’t feel bad about it.  “What kind of air power are we looking at?”

“Significant,” said a comm. tech who was flipping through different news programs.  “They seem to have biologically based technology of some kind, weaponry is mainly energy-based, propulsion… unclear.”

Wonderful.  Fury scanned the other screens, trying to get a better picture of what, exactly, was happening in New York.  What tactics the enemy was using, what numbers they had, what resistance had been put up so far and by whom. 

“Sir,” said Agent Hill.  “The council is on.”

The council.  The same one Coulson had just told him was infiltrated by HYDRA.  The same one that would probably find a way to make their present situation all the more untenable and Fury’s day infinitely worse. 

It was a pity he couldn’t ignore them. 

“Put them on.”

.

Pandora hissed at the sting of the enemies’ weapons.  They were not ectoblasts, no, but there was the taste of something like magic to them, and energy was energy.  Still, they were not enough to damage her unduly, although they might prove troublesome, dangerously so, for the weaker ghosts of their force. 

But that was the nature of war.  Few battles were won without bloodshed. 

Her warriors should otherwise be a match for the chitauri.  The chitauri had numbers, doubtlessly, but her warriors had experience.  And once Frostbite and Dorathea lead their forces onto the battlefield, well… She could not estimate the number of enemies.  She had been told that they came from the stars, and those lands were numerous to the point of being innumerable.  Even so, there was a limit to passage through a choke point, and even the stars themselves may not turn things in the favor of a commander caught in one, no matter their numbers. 

But the ghosts, too, must pass through a portal.  Pandora eyed the slight waver in the portal’s outline with disfavor.  She was no expert in such matters, but many years of existence had given her some intuition for how portals should behave.  This one was stable enough, but not for long. 

All the more reason to resolve things quickly. 

“Hunter,” she said. 

“What?” snapped the mechanical man, the burnished plates of his armor flashing in the Sun. 

“Your task.  Find Phantom.  Free him from whatever compulsion he is under.”  Although Phantom still had much to learn, he was undeniably powerful.  Returning him to his proper allegiance would

Skulker looked away from the beast he was dismembering with some reluctance.  “Fine.  Dog.  Come here.”

The dog ignored him.  As it was Phantom’s, and Skulker hadn’t made the effort to learn its name, that was really no surprise.  Still, Skulker gestured at it.  It, in turn, bounded away, yipping.

“Are you, or are you not, the greatest hunter in the Infinite Realms?  Find him with or without the dog.”

Skulker grumbled but flew off.  Good. 

Pandora manifested a joint in her neck just long enough to crack it and drummed her fingers on the lid of her box.  It had been too long, far too long, since she had engaged in a proper battle against evil, and the more vicious of the leviathans flying through the air looked like they would, at least, give her a challenge. 

.

Thor had become more open-minded since his short stay on Earth, with Dr. Selvig, Darcy, and… Dr. Jane Foster.  Truly.  But he had to admit, these ghosts were unnerving.  Too similar by far to the draugr that had ofttimes haunted the stories of bards – the ones that made his father glare and try to shoo away both Thor and Loki. 

He had to find his brother.  Soon.  With all that had happened, with how, exactly, Loki had behaved, he believed, truly believed Daniel Fenton’s assertion Loki was being controlled, somehow. 

It was a foul thing, to put such a geas on a prince of Asgard…  Although, to be fair, putting a geas on anyone was foul.  It just seemed especially foul to Thor, that someone should do it to his brother. 

Loki had, perhaps, never been quite so good as one might hope, but he had always been… himself, as vague as that description was.  Even when he’d been consumed by madness, letting jotnar into Asgard, sending the Destroyer after people on Earth, he had still been himself.

Thor did not like this new version of Loki, who was very much…  It was like seeing his brother through a warped pane of glass, or in a reflection.  In fact, he liked it so little that he couldn’t even enjoy the utter destruction he was wrecking on the chitauri, lightning, head-crushing, and all.  Not that he had been enjoying combat quite as much as he once did in general.

The price of being worthy, he presumed. 

Alas. 

A bright green flying dog whipped past him at speed, heading towards the tower.  He narrowed his eyes at it.  Most of the ghosts had stayed concentrated around the portals.  What cause had this one to stray?

But he could not go investigate.  He could still hear the screams of the civilians cornered in the buildings nearby.  He would not leave them to fend for themselves until he had cleared this street. 

.

Danny and Loki would both have preferred to use the elevators.  Unfortunately, significant parts of the main upper elevator shaft had been repurposed for extension-cable-from-hell-powering-up-a-doomsday-device purposes, and no one wanted to mess with that, and the military-type guys they still had with them recommended shutting them off from a tactical perspective of ‘there’s more of them then there are of us, and we don’t want to guard them all.’  So.  No elevators. 

Danny could have just dropped them through the floor instead, but Loki seemed concerned about the effect serially dropping through floors had on Danny. 

Or, well, the effect that the effect it had on Danny was having on him, in any case. 

“I refuse to get stuck in a ceiling again.  I am a god.  I am to be treated with some degree of gravitas.”

“It was one time.  You should’ve seen what I was like when I first got my powers.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Year and a half ago, about.”

Anyway, they were taking the stairs.  Danny wasn’t really upset about it, because it gave him more time to be annoying.  Right now, he was in the midst of a recital of all the ‘annoying younger sibling’ noises he had ever made.  Right now, he was working on ‘long drawn out sighs,’ which had really been a hit with Jazz, when he’d been eight.  Which was to say, she hated them.  A lot. 

And Loki didn’t seem to a have a lot of tolerance, either. 

“What,” he snapped, “are you doing?”

“Nothing,” said Danny, enjoying the way Loki’s face pinched up, as if he were searching for a way to order him to stop without really screwing up his other orders…

… speaking of which, could Danny have interpreted ‘get me out of here’ to mean ‘get me out of New York?’  Maybe.  But at this point, there were plenty of reasons to want them both in New York, including-- 

Danny’s train of thought derailed as he noticed the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairwell.  He looked down and then threw himself backwards as a redheaded woman – Romanov – brought a gun to bear on him.  She fired, twice, in quick succession.  Wow.  Rude.  And pretty brutal, too, but then again, New York was being invaded by aliens.  And she knew about his powers. 

(Hecking Fury, telling people about his powers.)

Although, considering trajectories… no, he was too sleep deprived to consider trajectories. 

He grabbed Loki’s arm, intending to drop them through the floor. 

“No, wait,” said Loki.  “Let’s see what the Widow wants.”  There was a malicious, almost cruel, edge to his voice, but there was a hollowness underneath it.  He did want to see why Black Widow, Natasha Romanov, was here, but the tone, the phrasing, was just to rile her up. 

Or to appear as if he wanted to rile her up.  Danny hadn’t listened to all the things Barton and Loki had discussed – too busy freaking out about the whole situation vis a vis mind control and alien invasions – but he hadn’t gotten the impression she was all that easy to rile up. 

But Danny had his orders.  And he still had to defend Loki.  Ice began to spread out from under his feet.  It was a bit sluggish, but it would give him the terrain advantage as far as maneuvers went.  The Widow kicked open the door on her landing and rolled out, into the floor beyond, staying more or less out of direct line of fire for both Danny and Loki. 

“I have eyes on Loki,” she said, out loud. 

.

“Crap,” said Tony, tossing the box to the Foley kid.  “Sorry, got to go, but hey!”  He was already heading for the edge of the roof.  “Maybe we won’t even need that if we do this right!”

.

Black Widow definitely been looking for them, which wasn’t surprising, but what was she carrying?  The bag was bulky and angular.  A weapon?  If so, why hadn’t she used it? 

Loki stepped out past Danny but stayed well within Danny’s ability to grab – or drop through the floor, if necessary.  Making the floor intangible instead was a valid strategy. 

“What is it you want, Widow?  Natasha Romanov?”

Romanov, meanwhile, had disappeared, almost as thoroughly as Danny could.  He tilted his head to one side, listening.  This floor, it seemed, had been imagined as semi-open lab space.  There were long work benches, empty places for equipment, some kind of robotic arm in the ceiling, and a cart full of plastic-wrapped computers, monitors and towers together. 

It was kind of cool.  There were a lot of places to hide. 

“Is this… revenge?  For Barton?”  Loki’s smile was sharp.  “He told me much about you, and I suppose Stark mentioned avenging this place.”  Two false images split off from Loki to prowl among the lab tables.  “It suits you better than it does him.  But don’t you think it somewhat… hypocritical?”

.

“Okay, Romanov, here’s how it is.  Loki likes illusions?  Let’s give him an illusion.”

.

Danny saw a flash of red out of the corner of his eye and angled himself to intercept, but no attack came. 

“After all… you’ve done so much… so much that others would be more than justified retaliating for, don’t you think?  All those regime changes, shall we call them?  And Barton’s no better, really.”  He hummed.  “The things you two did together.  Drakov’s daughter?  Sāo Paulo?  The hospital fire?  And you think taking vengeance on me will change anything?  You think it will make you some sort of hero?  Give you peace?  When you—”

One of the doors flew open, revealing Iron Man.  Who plowed through one fake Loki (Faki?  Fauki?  Fauxki?  Meh, he’d workshop it.) and swerved to shoot one of his repulsors at another.  Romanov popped up from behind a table and threw something at the feet of the real Loki, who crushed it with his heel, ignoring the sparks of electricity that flew up off of it. 

Danny batted Romanov back with a shield, straight into the cart of computers, which fell down on her.  Ouch.  But she’d be able to get back up and into the fight.  The important thing was that, right now, she wasn’t an immediate threat, which meant he could ignore her. 

Give her time. 

If she hadn’t wanted something, she would have run, kept hiding.  Just these few minutes – She was a shield agent, sure, but she had to have some kind of specialty in—

Anti-ghost missiles were a lot harder to avoid in such a small place, especially when distracted.  Danny hissed as one impacted his shoulder and splattered green all over his shirt, but he caught the next, and threw it back at Iron Man.  He tried to phase off the green goo, but it wouldn’t go.  It had to be some of that phase-proof stuff his parents had been working on.  Nasty stuff. 

Although, he had to be grateful it had only given him a bruise and hadn’t been mixed with something that would melt him.  It gave him hope for his future relationship with his parents. 

In the meantime, it definitely limited his options regarding protecting Loki and just removing themselves from the situation without getting into more destructive behavior. 

He hoped Iron Man knew what he was doing… for everyone’s sake. 

The missile exploded right in front of Iron Man’s mask, splattering him with green goo.  Danny had no idea what kind of sensor array he had, but that would probably buy at least a little time as he adjusted it to compensate for the eye-holes of his mask being covered up. 

He turned back to Loki, only to see another Iron Man grab the staff from him. 

Only for that Loki and that staff to dissolve into the air. 

Loki, the real Loki, stopped being invisible and laughed.  “Oh, that was good, that was very good.”  Not only was this Loki real, his smile might have been as well.  “But you didn’t think you could fool me, did you?”

Danny flicked invisible, noting with disfavor that the green goo stayed visible when he did so, and moved closer to Loki, fending off attacks.  Two Iron Men – Where did the second person come from?  Was it Barton, in a suit?  Someone else entirely?  The War Machine person?  Danny couldn’t remember his name.  – and Romanov together was a bit of a challenge for Danny to keep track of, given his present mental state. 

Luckily, however, one of the two suits, the first one, didn’t seem to have nearly the tactical awareness of the other.  He’d say it was Stark in the second suit, the fresher-looking one… the one without any form of ghost proofing Danny could detect. 

Danny swiped an intangible arm through the suit, cleaving through delicate wires as he did so, but leaving warm, human flesh untouched.  Several pieces of armor fell away, revealing a band t-shirt, but not the whole thing.  Interesting. 

Romanov threw a Fenton Ghost Zapper at him.  Loki knocked it out of the air, the sharp end of the scepter cutting it in two as he did so.  Iron Man – the one he was pretty sure was Tony Stark – tried to grab it again, even as Loki pivoted to try and catch Black Widow with it.  Danny used that as a pretext to pull Loki back, away from Black Widow.  They did not need her under control.  Nope. 

But… they wanted the staff.  They wanted the staff now. 

Selvig must have gotten knocked free.  He must have told them, one of them, about his safeguards. 

If one of these three could get the staff, get back to the top of the tower…  Then it would be over.  They’d have won. 

.

“Director Fury, the council has made a decision.”

Fury flexed his fingers behind his back.  “I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid ass decision, I've elected to ignore it.”  It’s what he’d say if he hadn’t learned what he’d just learned.  If HYDRA wasn’t threaded through every element of SHIELD like a deadly parasite.  If this sounded more like a simple fear-driven overreaction and less like a way to destroy one of HYDRAs most famous enemies and his new and very powerful allies? 

“Director, despite your shocking negligence, bordering on dereliction, you’re closer than any of our subs.  You scramble that jet—”

“That is the island of Manhattan, councilman.”  Although considering that HYDRA, in the person of Red Skull, had tried to blow it up in the past, he wasn’t sure that would sway them.  Until I’m certain my team can’t hold them—”

“There are two armies of alien origin, emerging from portals above that island.  If we don’t—”

“I will not order a nuclear strike against a civilian population, much less the densest population in the United States.  And the other army is an ally.”

“Based on what intelligence?  Based on what invitation?  That of someone already suborned by Loki?”

“If we don’t hold them in the air,” added another councilmember, “we lose.  We lose everything.”

“If I send that bird out, we already have.”

.

“Director Fury is no longer in command.  Override order, seven, alpha, eleven.”

“Sorry, sir,” said the pilot, who had just taken his seat.  He watched with some trepidation as Agent Coulson led a pair of his colleagues away.  This was all very irregular.  “I’m not familiar with that code.”

There was a pause.  “What’s your name, son?”

.

Cujo frolicked through the city.  It was loud, yes, but nothing he hadn’t been in training for while alive, and nothing he hadn’t experienced while dead.  So, a non-issue, obviously. 

The actual issue?  His person had just thrown a stick.  Obviously, Cujo had to go fetch it. 

Chapter Text

Cujo circled.  He was a good boy.  He was the best boy – that was a fact, his person told him so – but even he had to look for things, and there were a lot of interesting smells in the air.  Well, there were always a lot of interesting smells, but the smells today were interesting-er.  Along with the flashes of light, the dust, the noise—

There was just a lot going on. 

But!  That was okay!  Cujo liked challenges!  Challenges were fun!  And he was going to get that stick.  He just had to sniff it out, first. 

Ah-hah!  There it was!  All shiny and straight with a rounder, shinier, pointier bit on top.  He snatched it up off the broken car it was on (Why was it broken?  Who cared?) (Cujo didn’t know this, because he was a dog, but over fifteen pounds of enchanted gold, bronze, and topaz, falling from over a hundred stories, made an impact.  Specifically, fifteen pounds impacting at close to two hundred and fifty miles per hour, imparting over six hundred pounds of force – more than enough, considering the narrow profile of the object, to put a significant dent in the roof of a sedan.) and flew up in a spiral pattern. 

His person was nearby, yes, but… Where?  Usually, it was easier for Cujo to sniff him out, but now… now, there was something obscuring his scent. 

Cujo circled the tall building restlessly.  Where was his person?  Where?  Where?  It should have been much easier to find his person than it was to find the stick!  That’s how things were supposed to go, wasn’t it?

Oh!  There!  On top of the tall building!  It was his person’s friend!  Maybe he could play with Cujo! 

He zoomed down and deposited the stick in his lap, tail wagging. 

.

“Oh,” said Tucker, staring wide-eyed at the Scarab Scepter, covered, as it was, in green-tinted dog drool, “crap.”

.

“Oh,” said Pharaoh Duulaman, taking a moment to reward the beast who had retrieved his scepter with a pat on the head, “wonderful.”

.

Erik Selvig stumbled back into the penthouse, looking for a closet to hide himself in as burning sand from nowhere whipped itself into a storm.  He was, to be honest, in shock.  How many mind-controlling scepters could there possibly be?

.

Sam landed lightly on top of the Ops Center, powering down her jet pack momentarily, and propping the bazooka against her shoulder.  She was good at using it – no false modesty here – but it required work and attention, and she didn’t want her attention to be split while she was in the air.

“Tucker, is that sandstorm you?  Did you get your scepter back, somehow?”  She paused.  “Tucker?”  No response.  “Hey, everyone sees that sandstorm, righ—”

There was a huge flash through one of the sand clouds, followed almost instantly by a deep, bone-shaking, ear-splitting rumble.  A space whale fell out of the sky, smoking.

“I love storms like this!  Keep up the good work, Tucker!”

Sam bit her lip.  “If no one is hearing from Tucker, either his phone got wrecked or Duulaman’s got him messed up.  So, uh.  Be aware of that.”  There was, of course, the option that he’d somehow gotten himself killed, and this storm was caused by his ghost somehow (in which case, wow, he’d formed fast), but she was kind of.  Not thinking about that option.  So. 

She frowned.  The sandstorm was expanding. 

.

Thor flew through the storm. 

He did not often have the opportunity to navigate sandstorms.  There were no deserts in Asgard, and that was where he had spent his time for most of his life.  But a storm was a storm, and a sandstorm – or a dust storm, for that matter – held lightning in it. 

Lightning, through Mjolnir, was his.  Storms were his. 

And his brother—

He made quick work of the next group of chitauri he encountered, although they had already been injured by the sheer force of the storm.  He was getting closer to Stark’s tower, and where the fight with Loki was, but he couldn’t just leave the battle.  There were too many enemies. 

Something metallic flashed among the sand, and Thor readied a blow, but no.  That was no chitauri.  But neither was the metal suit a creation of Stark’s.  The green fire that burned at its head, and the lights behind its eyes was that of the ghosts.’ 

“A human?  Flying?” asked the creature, its words almost whipped away by the wind.  “No.  You’re the Asgardian that Phantom’s human friend talked about.  Do you know where he is?”

“Phantom?” asked Thor, warily.  “Yes.  With Loki.”

The creature grinned.  “Then what are you waiting for?  Lead on!”

.

Valerie didn’t like this.  She didn’t like this at all. 

“He’s really not responding?  Can we still hear other people?”

“I can sure hear all of you,” said Hawkeye.  “It might not mean anything.  Storms can mess with comms, sometimes.  Focus on what’s in front of you.”

Yeah, but the Fenton’s super ultra ghost comms, or whatever they actually were? 

What was in front of them was a legion of aliens they were trying to keep more or less in the air.  It was like Galaga, but real.  And worse.  Because, you know, people were dying.  Her weapons weren’t the most effective (unfortunately, the chitauri were firmly alive) so she’d been ferrying people down from damaged buildings, but now she was racing towards Stark Tower.

By the time she’d gotten through the portal, Danny had already disappeared with Loki, but now that they knew where he was, well.  She was the only one other than the ghosts with real experience fighting Danny, as crazy as that seemed. 

She really did not like the look of that storm. 

Tucker was okay, right?  They weren’t, like, great friends or anything, but they had dated, sort of, and Valerie didn’t hate him, really. 

She dove down into the sandstorm, and the HUD in her visor lit up with red lines, giving her an overlay of where things were supposed to be, based on city plans pulled from the internet.  It was risky flying like this, like flying by instruments on a plane.  Records weren’t always right.  She knew that much from flying in Amity Park, and New York was probably worse, honestly. 

But there weren’t any buildings quite as tall as Stark Tower, so her chances of running into a building were slim.  Chitauri gliders and Iron Man, on the other hand… Well.  It’d probably be fine.  This far up, it’d take a while to hit the ground. 

Wire-traced lines splayed out below her, showing her an outline of the roof, and she carefully landed near the center, a good way away from the pillar of light that was the portal beam. 

“Tucker?” she called. 

A bubble of clear, but blisteringly hot air formed on the roof.  Her HUD helpfully informed her that the temperature was 101.49°F/38.61°C.  At the center stood Tucker in full Egyptian regalia.  His eyes were bright, solid red. 

“Hello, Valerie Gray.”

.

It wasn’t a guarantee that the pilots were HYDRA.  The chances weren’t even above fifty percent, as far as Coulson’s estimates went, which were, admittedly, based largely on hunches at this stage.  Even for him, the amount of research he could do under the present circumstances was… limited.  But the odds were still too high to let them sit in those planes. 

Especially when the council was ordering Fury to launch a nuke at New York. 

Yeah.  That wasn’t going to fly. 

(Literally.)

So far, both of the pilots had been compliant, but Coulson wasn’t going to relax.  He wasn’t missing an ‘until’ at the end of that sentence.  He just wasn’t going to relax. 

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be happier when there were no longer two potential HYDRA agents walking behind him. 

He turned the corner.  At the other end of the hallway, Jasper Sitwell and six other agents also turned the corner.  He saw the flash of blue characteristic of Phase Two weaponry and his gun was in his hand before his conscious mind processed the connection. 

He got off two shots before he was hit.  Center of mass.  If it had been a conventional bullet, it would have bounced off the Kevlar vest he had on underneath his jacket, but it wasn’t designed to counter Phase Two weaponry.  Nothing was.  The pilot directly behind him got off one wild shot at Sitwell before the second pilot shot him in the back of his head. 

Lying on the ground, Coulson mentally apologized to him.  He hadn’t been HYDRA after all.  Not that it did either of them any good. 

But Coulson was down, not out.  He’d kept a grip on his gun, and now he aimed it at the pilot.  It was probably too much to hope he was the only HYDRA agent onboard who could fly a plane, but any delay—

He didn’t see if his bullet hit.  He’d been shot again. 

.

Loki didn’t seem at all interested in escaping. 

They could have escaped.  Definitely.  Absolutely.  It would have been easy to escape, at least temporarily.  But Loki was uninterested. 

And they kept going for the scepter. 

They definitely knew, which was something that had Danny’s heart racing.  Well.  Racing as much as it ever did. 

Unfortunately, the three of them weren’t quite good enough to take the scepter, and Loki’s obvious malingering aside, Danny couldn’t, like, talk to him about it.  Talk him into doing something about it, talk him out of doing something about it, whatever.  Partially because they were in the middle of a fight (duh), partially because of the influences still acting on him.  Boxing him in.  Forcing him to fight in the first place. 

Mind control sucked. 

Really, what he had to hope for at this point was that something would come along that was actually a threat.  The Hulk or something.  Danny wasn’t sure he could beat the Hulk as a human.  Escape him, sure, maybe even trap him, temporarily, but beat him?  That was a different thing altogether.  Oh!  Or maybe Pandora.  Pandora was really cool, and maybe mind control could be sucked into her evil-trapping box. 

Probably not, but a guy could dream. 

He pulled another piece of armor off of Tony Stark, who, mostly unarmed, seemed to decide that discretion was the better part of valor and booked it, sliding over one of the lab tables and disappearing behind a partition.  Good for him.  Discretion, valor, all that.

The mechanical arms on the ceiling began to move.  Danny, not expecting that, failed to dodge and was knocked over a table.  Iron Man #2 bore down on him, flinging a prototype Fenton Net with Utra-Grav Weights (patent pending) at him.  Unfortunately for Iron Man #2 these things didn’t have the same level of protection against Danny as the other weapons.  Probably didn’t have time to modify it.  Just stuffed whatever could fit into the suit and hoped something would hit.  Danny drained its energy and tore it, easily. 

Loki, surprisingly, looked like he was having trouble with Black Widow and the mechanical arms.  He was probably just faking.  But the appearance was enough for Danny, and he grinned as he dropped Mr. Norse God of Mischief through the floor, then tore off his green-stained shirt and dropped through himself. 

“You,” said Loki, “are a menace.”

“Thank you,” said Danny.  “I try.”

Loki rolled his eyes and handed Danny his jacket.  “You look ridiculous without a shirt.  You have less muscle than an infant.”

“That’s completely untrue.  I’ve got a six pack.”  He did.  It wasn’t a super well defined six pack and existed more due to lack of body fat than muscle mass, but it did exist.  “Unless, like, alien babies are ridiculously ripped.”  Which was a possibility.  It wasn’t as if Loki had been super forthcoming about, well, anything.  Which was incredibly unfair of him.  Danny deserved to know more about aliens.  Particularly the space-related parts. 

A thump from above shook dust off the ceiling.  They both looked up.

“Stark does not seem like one to attempt to follow us directly through the floor,” observed Loki. 

Danny licked his lips.  “You know what it means that they want the scepter.”  He cast a sidelong look at Loki.  Loki looked… Well, his whole… everything looked really weird without the armored trench-coat-like… thing.  The jacket.  Whatever.  It probably had some kind of fancy Asgardian name that, once again, Danny was not privileged to know. 

He wasn’t upset about the relative lack of space-related knowledge he was receiving. 

But, to get back to the point, Loki looked awful.  Like, he hadn’t looked great before, but now he looked the way Danny felt.  Which was bad.  In case anyone was wondering.  And also reading his thoughts.  Which wasn’t super likely, but also not outside of the realm of possibility.  And, hey, maybe the part of him that was still sitting out the whole mind-control thing would appreciate the context if it didn’t already have it. 

“It means,” said Danny, probably unnecessarily, “that they know.”

There was another thump, a louder one, but now that Danny was paying attention, it didn’t quite seem like it was coming from above—

The next sound was distinctly more crash or explosion like. 

“Uh,” said Danny.

“Thor,” said Loki, baring his teeth in something that wasn’t a smile at all.  “Perhaps this time, my brother will do me the honor of fighting me in earnest!”

“I don’t think honor is really the right word for that,” said Danny. 

His ghost sense went off. 

Skulker phased through the ceiling shortly before Thor’s hammer turned it into rubble.  Danny managed to get Loki out of the way, but this?  This would be difficult.  He felt his lips stretching in an approximation of Loki’s expression.  Okay.  So.  He might empathize a little.

And then the sand blew in. 

Yep. 

Difficult.

.

“What,” said Tony, “the hell is going on?”

“I think Tucker might have lost control,” said Jazz, “but it’s a little unclear right now.”

“Yeah, I think that might have to do with the sandstorm in my building.”  He’d slammed down the lab’s steel blast shields as soon as he realized that the sand was a) razor sharp and b) eating all the glassware in the room, and now he and Romanov were shut in one of the lab’s testing areas.  Never say he didn’t give his employees the best.  “JARVIS, can you navigate?”

“Yes,” said JARVIS, who was piloting the other suit.  The AI’s control over it wasn’t great.  They’d done tests – a bunch of tests, Tony had plans – but he hadn’t intended for JARVIS’s first foray into solo-piloting a suit to be such a trial-by-fire.  However, a mapped area like the tower, where JARVIS was completely aware of the floorplan, wasn’t the worst place to start.  In some ways it would’ve been better for JARVIS to take the Mk. VII, but Tony had known the kid would be able to take that one apart, and one of the two of them had an actual body outside of tech, so…  “One moment, Mr. Stark.”

“What do we do now?” asked Romanov. 

“Try to see what other systems I can access from here,” said Tony, impatiently tapping through the interface for the mechanical arms.  It was the only computer currently installed.  “Hope the sandstorm gets taken care of soon.  Hope rip-off green and silver me is worth something in a fight and that Thor doesn’t get tricked again.  Lots of hope.”

“But not much doing,” pointed out Romanov. 

“Maybe one of you can take over as mission control,” said Jazz.  “Because we’re going to be hit with the storm soon, and then I’ll be focused on keeping us steady.”

.

The pilot was relieved when he saw the man he replaced returning.  Sure, Agent Coulson had told him not to leave without direct orders from him or Fury, personally, but Coulson wasn’t the one with the World Security Council breathing down his neck.  And the conversation with the WSC was getting… progressively more unsettling.  If he could call it a conversation.  They’d brought up his family several times in what might have been a vaguely threatening way, but, luckily, he hated his family, so he didn’t care if they got their taxes audited or shipped to a black site or whatever conclusion he was supposed to draw from what they were saying. 

Point being, he got out as soon as the other man knocked on the cockpit glass.  Yes, he’d probably be reprimanded, but he could handle that better than the WSC.  Plus, it looked like his usual plane was being loaded up to go fight those aliens, and he was always happier when his bird wasn’t carrying a nuke. 

He waved to the pilot in the plane next to him as he went, one of the other replacements.  He’d taken his helmet off for some reason, and he looked terrible.  Completely white-faced.  Must be the kid’s first time sitting on a nuke.  Well, hopefully the guy he replaced would be back, soon, too.

.

“Once I remove these armies, this city shall make a fine capital,” said Duulaman.  “Pandora and Frostbite I shall reward handsomely, of course.  I invited them.  But the others…  These insects.”  Duulaman paced on the edge of the rooftop.  “The sheer insult cannot be borne.  I will allow these ‘police’ to live, should they swear allegiance to me.”

Valerie watched him, and the ghost dog padding along next to him, warily.  “The police aren’t an army.  Technically.”  Not that they weren’t full of crap more than half the time, but they weren’t actually an army. 

Duulaman waved a hand at her, lazily.  “Anything that has to be appended with technically is a lie.  Everything will be much better after I fix it.  Some of these buildings…” 

He pointed, and a nearby skyscraper shimmered into a pyramid, like a mirage.  It shimmered back after a second, but the sight still made Valerie’s breath catch in her throat.  That was definitely enough of that. 

“Tucker,” she said, voice tight.  “You’ve got to snap out of it, this isn’t you.”

“I have snapped out of it,” said Duulaman.  “This is what I was before.  This is what I was always meant to be.  And would the people of Earth not prefer a native son to rule in place of a dictator from beyond Great Ra’s furthest reach?”  He spread his arms.  “I will return to this world the glories of Kemet, that even in ruin and decay are celebrated thousands of years on.  I would think you would understand, Valerie Gray.  After all, you, too, have wished to return to what you once were.”

“Okay, yeah, I’ve maybe thought about that once or twice,” admitted Valerie, “and what you’re saying does sound cool, but can you do it without the megalomania and the sandstorm of death?”

“You want me to cease my efforts against the invaders?”

“No?” said Valerie.  She did not know what the right answer was here.  “But, look, I might’ve wanted to go back to the way things were before my dad lost his job, but I’m not that person anymore, obviously.  Can you really say you’re the same person you were, what, a thousand years ago?”

Duulaman rolled his eyes.  “The next thing to reform will obviously be the educational system.”

.

The sand was the worst.  So was Skulker.  And Thor.  And Iron Man #2.  And Loki, while he was at it.  It was all the worst. 

But then, that was a good thing.  Sort of. 

Lightning crackled through the sand cloud as Thor swung at another fake Loki.  The resultant impact with the floor sent cracks through the tile and concrete.  Danny didn’t have time to pay attention to that, though, because between Skulker and Iron Man #2, there was a lot of stuff flying through the air.  Missiles, bullets, knives, those weird repulsor ray things, ectoblasts, more nets, the works. 

.

“What did you say that tin can is using on the teenager?” asked Tony, appalled. 

“You shot missiles at him, too,” pointed out Romanov.

Tony stared at her, wide-eyed.  “Full of the equivalent of paint, yeah.  Aren’t you bothered by this?  At all?”

She shrugged.  “I started younger.”

“Of course you did.”

.

All in all, a normal day for Danny.  If he’d been in ghost form and not trying to protect Loki at the same time. 

He was getting closer to his limit. 

The whole fight went through a pair of walls, and Danny hoped that they weren’t breaking anything structural, because to the best of his knowledge, Black Widow and Tony Stark were still up there on the other floor, with minimal protection. 

They stopped just short of the next wall, a pane of frosted glass—except the glass wasn’t supposed to be frosted, apparently, and a second after they’d gotten there, even more sand blasted in.  The wind sucked at them, creating a sort of vacuum pulling them out.  Danny didn’t particularly feel like fighting three people who could fly while falling through the sky, so he anchored himself to the floor with ice.  Iron Man #2 (seriously, who was that guy?) promptly tumbled out into the sand and vanished. 

He was probably fine.  He could fly. 

.

“Sir,” said JARVIS, “I appear to have collided with one of our neighbors.”

“Please tell me you mean a building and not a person who will sue me.”

“I am quite certain people will sue you for this regardless.”

The terrible thing was, JARVIS was probably right. 

.

Thor and Loki grappled momentarily, hammer to scepter, and then Loki twisted, the hammer sliding down, into the floor, with a huge bang that echoed despite the howling of the wind.  At the edge of Danny’s ice, the floor fractured, then began to tip outward.  Danny took the opportunity to throw Skulker at Thor, who mostly phased through except for when he ran into the hammer, which knocked both of them off balance and half into Loki. 

Who promptly fell out of the building. 

Danny lunged after him, but Thor caught him by the heel.  Danny thanked him by kicking his chin as hard as he could.  He’d have to apologize later. 

For now… 

For now, Loki was way too far down for Danny to catch with the powers he had available in human form, and he had no idea what kind of a height would kill an Asgardian. 

(Or whatever Loki was.  He was still unclear on that.)

(And, yes, he was still resentful of his lack of alien knowledge.)

(He was never going to let it go.  He was going to get a t-shirt that said ‘I spent three days mind controlled by an alien and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and sleep deprivation.’)

(He was pretty sure it was three days, anyway.)

Anyway, point was, his orders were to protect Loki, and the only way to do that right now was to go ghost. 

Finally.

.

Okay.  So.  Valerie had tried reasoning with her mind-controlled kinda-sorta friend, but the sandstorm was getting bigger, and he was talking about conquering Syria (yikes), Mitanni (where?), and New Jersey (meh), and also making her one of his chief advisors, which was flattering but not really something she wanted, so she was pretty sure now was the time to try something more physical.   

She braced herself to move fast, and pulled up the biggest gun she could safely use on a human. 

Duulaman countered it easily, batting the blast away with the scepter.  He sighed.  “Of course.  I will have to take care of things here first.”

Next to him, the dog perked up, as if hearing something, then jumped for the scepter. 

“Argh!” said Duulaman.  “What are you doing?”

Well, Valerie wasn’t a fan of that stupid dog, but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth or an ally in a fight in a motivation.  She charged her blasters. 

.

Cujo had just sensed his person!  His person was here!  And since his person’s friend wasn’t playing fetch after all, it was time to get his stick back!  Or play keep away!  That would be good, too! 

Cujo was having a great time, and he was being the best boy!

.

Danny’s transformation burned through his body like fire through flash paper, a brilliant flare of energy kept contained for too long.  The bonds on his mind, designed to control something of this world, something alive, shredded themselves on the crystalline, ethereal geometries that were Phantom as the pieces of himself that were kept separate came back together.  Whole again.  Free again.  Able to choose. 

He caught Loki and landed them in an alley that was, at least, somewhat protected from the howling storm.  Loki stumbled away from him. 

“You caught me,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it. 

“Well, yeah,” said Danny.  “I wasn’t about to let you fall to your death.”  He held out his hand.  His white glove gleamed moon-bright in the shadows of the alleyway.  “You’ve made your point.  They’ve come together.”

“Half a dozen men does not an army make,” said Loki, his body between Danny and the staff, “and I—"

“I think there was at least one woman with them.  Also, my friends.  Tucker.  Jazz.  Sam.  Tucker actually sort of beat you up a little bit, there—”

“Don’t be obtuse, child,” snapped Loki, moving a little further away.  There was a glimmer of magic on his skin, and Danny knew they’d be more evenly matched in a fight than either of them would like… at least, without Danny resorting to the kinds of attacks he’d use against his stronger enemies.

“What do you want them to do,” asked Danny, throwing up his hands, “materialize an army out of nowhere in under a week?  Well, they did!”  Danny jabbed his finger up, where the green line of the ghost portal was still barely visible. 

It chose that moment to flicker out into nothing.

.

The Ops Center had already been struggling, but the moment the sandstorm hit it, everything but emergency controls and communication went down.  The wind pushed them sideways, and Jazz struggled to keep the airship upright.  By the time she managed something like stability, the ghost portal was long gone.  

Sam staggered onto the bridge.  She’d stayed out until the last minute. 

“The portal?” she asked, managing to get to the copilot’s seat. 

“Gone,” said Jazz.  She tapped comms.  “I’m going to have to set us down, we can’t maintain our position in this.”  An alarm – something for envelope integrity – started to go off.  “Hawkeye, if you aren’t already off the roof, you need to go now.  I won’t be able to see you.”  And even if she didn’t like the guy very much, she didn’t want to squish him with the Ops Center.

“Got it,” said Hawkeye.  “I’m headed down, now.  Hopefully things will be clearer closer to street level.”

Jazz inhaled slowly, and carefully started down.

.

Loki raised an eyebrow. 

“Come on, you want the chitauri here as much as I do.”  Which was to say, not at all.  “Give me the staff so we can end this.”

“It is my destiny to rule this place.  My… my glorious purpose.”

“I don’t believe in destiny,” said Danny, moving closer.  After all, if destiny was really a thing, his family and friends would all be dead along with a big chunk of the population of the US.  “It sucks and it’s also really uncool.”

“And you think that makes you free of it?”

“Well, yeah.  That is how that works, actually.  You’re free to choose what to do.”

Loki laughed.  “There is no choice.  Freedom is life’s great lie.”

“Well, maybe the bigger lie is that you don’t have a choice?  Have you thought of that, huh?”  Danny gestured emphatically, aware that he was not delivering this argument as eloquently as he could be, but since Loki was regurgitating lines from the night he’d popped out of the Tesseract, he felt like he was winning.  “Like, that’d be the real trick, wouldn’t it?  A really great lie.  Because there’s always a choice.  I mean, like, right now, you can choose to keep doing this, and then we’ll fight, and, no offense, but if you haven’t managed to run away under my nose or something, I’m definitely going to beat you up, I have experience with this, or you can choose to stop this and give me the staff.  Obviously, I’d prefer you to give me the staff, but, like.  It’s a choice.”

Loki stared at him.  “Do you always talk this much?”

“Only when I’m sleep deprived, so, really, this is your fault.”

A sigh came from behind him, and he twisted to see Loki fade out of invisibility.  “Now you sound like my father.”

He held out the staff.  Danny took it.  It felt cold, heavy, and unpleasantly alive in his hand. 

“Uh,” he said, lifting off the ground.  The portal device was, after all, on the top of the tower.  “My condolences about your dad, I guess.”

“He’s still alive,” shouted Loki after him.

“Yeah?  So?” Danny shouted back.  He didn’t get an answer. 

He flew up, faster, faster, as fast as he could go, now, and braked in the middle of a firefight between Tucker and Valerie… and Cujo?  Or Duulaman and Valerie.  He recognized those red eyes.  (And Cujo.)

(Cujo was the best boy, trying to get the staff away from Tucker.  So smart!  Danny made a mental note to give him lots of treats and pets when this was over.)

Duulaman smiled and tilted the scarab scepter just so.  “Hello, Danny.”

“Nope!”  Danny zoomed past Tucker/Duulaman in a burst of speed.  “I’ve already fulfilled my mind control quota for the year, thanks!”  He used shields to push away the sand and flew directly towards the portal device.  He would’ve liked to free Tucker on the way, but the portal spewing an alien army had to come first.  Every minute it stayed open, more people would die. 

(He wondered how many people had died while he talked Loki into giving up the scepter.  He wondered how many would have died if they fought, Danny tearing through illusions and Loki running for his chitauri ‘allies.’  He wondered which number would have been bigger.)

He plunged the scepter into the heart of the device, smacking the Tesseract off-center.  The device, naturally, didn’t like that, and some whirring part inside it kicked up into a high-pitched scream before the device shut down altogether. 

Danny grinned, then turned to face Tucker.  That was one problem down.  Now he just needed to knock some sense into Tucker and help with the chitauri that were still in the city.

Heh.  Just.  That really went to show what his week had been like.  Thank goodness it was almost over. 

.

“Hill, have you seen Coulson?” asked Fury.  Coulson hadn’t been answering his comms, which, given the HYDRA situation, might very well mean that he was dead, but Fury couldn’t just start sending people out to look for him.  On the other hand, it was possible Coulson was utilizing alternate methods of communication. 

“No,” said Hill.  “I—”  She cut herself off, fingers flying over her keyboards.  “Sir, we have a bird in motion! Anyone on the deck, we have a rogue bird! We need to shut it down! Repeat! Take off is not authorized!”

Fury didn’t waste his breath swearing.  He took the emergency route – the one also stocked with emergency weapons – up to the deck. 

He didn’t like shooting at his own people, but the fact was, whoever was in that plane wasn’t one of his.  He raised the RPG to his shoulder and fired.  It hit, sending the plane spinning across the deck, just in time for the second plane to shoot off past Fury. 

Reflexively, he drew his gun, but there was nothing a little handgun could do against a fighter jet that was already hundreds of feet away. 

There was only one more thing he could do. 

Chapter Text

Tony gave Romanov a boost to get out past the stuck blast shutter.  The room had tipped sideways – the fight below them had taken out at least one important support pillar, and although several of the builders had complained that Tony and Pepper had overengineered the building, everything had limits.  Hopefully some of that ‘overengineering’ would keep the floor from falling out of the building entirely, but Tony didn’t feel like risking it, and neither did Romanov. 

The problem was, that not all of the safety features had been installed or tested yet.  Normally, there would have been an emergency release switch for the shutters, but as it was, it hadn’t been wired in.  Tony would be complaining about that to the contractors, by the way.  The wiring on this floor was supposed to be done. 

Tony, in turn, activated the repulsors on his boots – one of the few armor pieces he had after Danny had more or less disassembled him – and grabbed the top of the shutter before swinging himself over.  He did it with a lot less grace than Natasha and clipped his knee on the way over. 

“Ow!”  He stabilized himself.  “Well.  Let’s get going!  Can’t get the scepter, might as well do the shields!”

Of course, Romanov was already way ahead of him.  They jogged out into the corridor, and immediately ran into half a dozen men with guns. 

So.  This is where Loki’s mooks wound up.  He’d been wondering. 

Romanov threw the back of shield generators back at him.  Which – first off, he could hold his own in a fight without armor, so, rude, secondly—

Romanov had already taken out three of the six men.  The fifth gasped and passed out apropos of nothing.  Tony punched the sixth and final one in the face, hard, with his still-gauntleted hand. 

“Stark, Gray, you hearing me?”

“Bit busy!” screamed Valerie Gray in his ear.

“Uh, yeah, what’s up?  Thought you were staying out of this fight, Fury.”

“We have a missile headed straight for the city.”

“I’m sorry, it sounded like you just said we had a missile headed for the city, but I know, I know you couldn’t have—”

“It’s nuclear and Phase Two, no more than ten minutes out, taking the storm into account.”

“A nuke?  A nuke?”

“I don’t—JARVIS--?”

“Sorry, sir, the Mark VI is still not operational.”

“I don’t have a useable suit.  Valerie, can your suit push a missile off course?”

“Wh—No!  I can’t even carry three extra people on my board.  I--  Holy crap!”

“I’m sorry,” said Danny Fenton, “did you say nuke?”

.

“It’s nuclear and Phase Two, no more than ten minutes out, taking the storm into account.”

“He did say nuke, didn’t he?” asked Sam as the conversation continued. 

“Yep,” said Jazz.  “Maybe if we take off, we could--  Could we ram it?”

“What would that do?  Set it off early?  Maybe my jetpack—”

“Wh—No!  I can’t even carry three extra people on my board.  I--  Holy crap!”

“I’m sorry,” said Danny, “did you say nuke?”

.

In the middle of evacuating the subway, Steve froze.  This fight had been going on for less than half an hour.  Who the hell had decided to use nukes?

He thumbed the control on his comm, intending to demand a repeat, but someone else beat him to it. 

“I’m sorry,” said Danny Fenton, “did you say nuke?”

.

“A bit busy!” shouted Valerie, apropos of apparently nothing in the middle of the tag-team between them and Tucker. 

She must have some form of communicator.  A Fenton Phone, maybe?  Or something built into her suit?  It didn’t matter to Danny, honestly, he was busy, too.  Tucker kept trying to use the mind control aspect of his staff on him, and although Danny was handily shrugging it off with his newfound passionate dislike of mind control and intense awareness of the magic mind control staff he was holding, it was still distracting. 

“A nuke?  A nuke?”

Not so distracting that he couldn’t hear that, though.  Surely, no one was aiming a nuke at the city now.  Right?  Because that would be crazy.  The portal was closed.  Heck, both of the portals were closed, even if the GIW had a nuke (which in itself would be nuts, those guys were incredibly incompetent). 

Crazy enough that even Tucker stopped what he was doing and turned to Valerie, slack-jawed.  

Which made a great opening for Danny to yank the staff out of his hands.  Tucker wobbled for a second, still wide-eyed, then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he crumpled.  Danny caught him before he could fall off the platform he’d been standing on.  Stark’s roof was a mess, and the sand sifting down out of the sky was only making it worse.

He put Tucker in the recovery position and made sure he was still breathing – he was – then turned his attention to Valerie.  In his experience, overshadowing-related fatigue rarely killed people, so hopefully past-life-takeover fatigue wouldn’t either.  Nukes were another story. 

“Wh—No!  I can’t even carry three extra people on my board.  I—” Valerie startled badly, having failed to notice Danny getting closer.  “Holy crap!”

“I’m sorry,” said Danny, trying to be polite, “did you say nuke?”  He looked up at Valerie.  “Can you turn that to speaker or something?”

Valerie retracted her helmet, and pulled a Fenton Phone from her ear, turning the volume all the way up. 

“Danny, is that you?” asked Jazz.

“I’m not under mind control anymore.  Is there really a nuke coming?”

“You and Thor are our only fliers, kid.”  Danny wasn’t sure if that was Tony Stark or Captain America.  “Can you move it?”

“I—Probably?”  He could bench a school bus, and a nuke would probably be launched from a sub or a plane, neither of which were going to be lugging around school-bus-sized armaments.  “But where would I put it?  How long do I have to move it?  Will it only go off with impact, or--?”

“Less than ten minutes.”

Oh. 

“Maybe Tucker—”

“Wha?” asked Tucker, sitting up.  He made an attempt to stand up, then sat right back down.

“Could you get rid of a nuke?” asked Danny, vaguely aware of a parallel conversation (“Has anyone spoken to Thor?” – “I think he burned out his comm.”) going on through the Fenton Phones.  “If I gave you back the staff.”  He even held it out to Tucker, as inadvisable as that was. 

Tucker reached out, touched it with the very tip of his finger, and pulled back, the motion violently sharp.  His nose started bleeding.

“No,” he said.  “Out of power.  I’m.”  He waved at himself.  “Notice how I wasn’t doing stuff like in Amity?  A sandstorm was all…  A nuke?  What if you made it intangible?”

“I don’t know.  That isn’t exactly something I’ve tested.”  He waved his hands.  “I’ve got to be touching the thing to make intangible.  Explosions, explosions aren’t all one thing.”  He knew that from experience. 

“Maybe you could make the city intangible,” suggested Valerie, “and the blast would just miss.”

“Val,” said Danny, strained, “I don’t think I could even make this building intangible all at once.”

“The shields,” said his mother, breathlessly.  “You could trap it in a shield.  One of the modified ones.”

“It’s one of their original uses!” added his father.  “Radiation barriers!  Of course, we were worried about spectral radiation, but it wouldn’t be a Fentonworks product if we didn’t go above and beyond!”

“Okay,” said Danny.  “Okay.”  He duplicated himself.  Once.  Twice.  Three times.  Eight wasn’t a stable number for him, but he wasn’t going to try to fight.  “I’m getting the ghosts.”  If all else failed, maybe their natural shields could contain the nuke.  “What do we need to set up the shields?”

“Romanov and I have the shields.  We’re trying to get up to where you are, but—” 

“Say no more.”  A duplicate angled downwards, back through the building.

“You’ll need to get the missile in the right location as well.  Right over Stark Tower, as close to where the portal was as possible,” said Mom.  “That’s what our calculations are for, and we don’t have time to rerun them.”

“Okay, and other setup?” 

“We need Selvig,” said Tucker, pointing back toward the penthouse.  “I think he shut himself in a closet—”

“I’ll get him,” said Valerie. 

“What else?” Danny asked Tucker. 

.

Thor and Skulker, flying just outside the tower, obviously looking for Loki, were the first ones he found. 

“Where is Lo—” started Thor. 

“Later.  For now, I need you to help me steer a nuke.”

“Pardon?” said Thor. 

“Why is there a nuke?” asked Skulker. 

“I’ll explain on the way.”  Well.  He’d try.  He was as clueless about why there was a nuke as they were. 

.

Black Widow and Tony Stark weren’t too far away from the lab they’d fought in. 

“Ready to go up?” he asked, not waiting for a response before grabbing their elbows and flying straight up through the floor. 

“Oh, that’s weird,” said Stark, stumbling a little when Danny set him down next to Tucker.  He got right to work, taking the bag from Black Widow and pulling out a set of shield generators. 

Danny’s duplicate was kneeling between Tucker and Selvig, helping him with splicing in cables, and Stark and Widow both did a very obvious double take when they noticed. 

“Nice trick,” muttered Tony. 

“Yeah,” said the other duplicate, as it fused with the other one to be more stable, but kept the extra arms.  “I can’t do it while I’m human, though.”

Black Widow leaned back on her left leg.  “Lucky us.”

.

“Great One!” exclaimed Frostbite, waving enthusiastically as he pulled a wicked spear out of the body of a space whale.  “You’ve thrown off your compulsion!”

“Yep!  But someone lobbed a superweapon at us and it’ll hit in five minutes!”  He gestured in the general direction the nuke was coming from.  “Help?”

Frostbite’s smile fell off his face entirely.  So did those of all the other nearby yetis.  “They what?”

.

Jazz felt useless.  She wasn’t fighting the aliens, or evacuating people, or working on the shields.  All she could do from here was direct communications.  She knew that was important, vitally important, but it sort of felt pale and weak knowing that a nuclear bomb was racing straight towards Stark Tower. 

Which was where her little brother was. 

And Tucker. 

And Valerie.  

And about half of the ‘Avengers.’

And none of that even mattered, really, because all of Manhattan, if not all of New York City could be flattened by this thing.  She was sure the Ops Center was in range, anyway. 

“Jazz,” said Sam.  “Look!”

She jerked her head up, looking away from the controls and out the main window.  The day had started out bright and sunny, but between the smoke, the sandstorm, and possibly whatever Thor had done, the city now looked quite dark.  Against that dark background moved dozens of motes of light, converging on Stark Tower, rising up from shadowy streets or corpses of defeated alien whales. 

And, like a burning arrow, the missile knifed across the sky. 

.

“We’re not going to get it done fast enough,” said Selvig.

“Don’t say that,” said Tucker.  “Don’t say that.”

Tony hated to admit it, but Selvig was probably right.  They’d only managed to complete the wiring and setting changes on one of the generators, and the missile was—

“Please,” said Loki. 

Black Widow aimed an incredibly vicious kick directly at his crotch, but it passed through him, like he was smoke. 

Another Loki leaned over Danny, reaching towards the unfinished portal generators.  The portal generators shimmered and changed, becoming identical to the one they’d modified.

“An illusion—” started Tucker. 

“The best lies are those you can make true.”  Loki’s grin was sharp.  “They will last only for a few minutes.  I have no intention of trying my might against this nuclear missile of yours.”  He raised his hand, showing off a Fenton Phone.  So.  That’s where Thor’s had gotten to.  “You can trust me on this, at least.”

.

Thor saw the tower, and dropped his hand, letting Mjolnir pull him away from the weapon.  He had done his part, pushing it up, to where the portal had once been.  Now it was the ghosts’ task to take it the rest of the way. 

.

Steve stopped and looked up, shading his eyes against the sky with one hand while the other snapped out to catch his shield.  The missile was clear and visible, leaving a distinct trail of exhaust. 

He closed his eyes and started reciting a prayer.

.

(It wasn’t as if the Hulk could be killed by something like a nuclear bomb, anyway.  Still, something made him look up.  Something made him hold the girl he’d just saved from a chitauri warrior just a little bit closer.)

.

“Now!” screamed Maddie. 

Tucker flipped the switch. 

.

Loki was at his limits, magically, but if he couldn’t push himself now, when could he?  He raised his hand, and a thin layer of ice grew over them.  A thin barrier, if he understood the nature of this weapon correctly, but a barrier nonetheless. 

.

Above and around Stark Tower, the ghosts raised their hands.  Shields formed, layers upon layers of them, intricate and interlocking; some ghosts floated outside them, others were wedged between layers, unable to be too far from the shields they were making without losing them.  The innermost ghosts were six of Danny’s duplicates, orbiting the missile, which, for a split second, hung suspended in the perfect center of the shield. 

Then it hit the other side. 

Everything went white. 

.

.

.

.

.

.

Danny pried his eyes open.  The sky was blurry and greenish, and, for a moment, he panicked, convinced that he’d died all the way and was now in the Ghost Zone.  But his vision cleared, and it soon became obvious he was looking at a sky that was blue, if very smoky and full of green… things.  Shiny little motes of ectoplasm.

He was also lying in a very uncomfortable position.  There was stuff on him.  And under him.  All around him, actually. 

He sat up, pushing the remains of a couple shield generators and what looked like a good half of Loki’s portal device off himself. 

This was… a good sign.  If the shields hadn’t worked, all this stuff would’ve been vaporized.  Probably.  Danny supposed that it could’ve just stopped the blast, but not the radiation. 

… Danny didn’t feel irradiated, but he was probably not the best judge for that kind of thing.  He wondered who would be a good judge.  The Hulk, maybe?

Dr. Selvig was on the ground next to him, unconscious and bruised but alive.  Danny picked some of the debris off him, but otherwise left him there.  He didn’t want to hurt him more if it turned out he had a broken neck or something like that.

There was a clatter, and Danny jumped, ready to fight again, but it was just Cujo in puppy form, carrying both stupid mind control staffs.  Staves?  He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes.  Why were there two of these things? 

“Good boy,” said Danny, taking the… scepters.  There.  That was one with an unambiguous plural.  “I’ll have to play a real game of fetch with you sometime soon, okay?” 

Cujo wagged his tail and Danny petted him. 

“Where’s everyone else, though?”  It was possible they’d gotten blasted over the edge, which Danny didn’t really want to think about, but there was also a lot of trash on the roof – remnants of Stark’s landing pad and armor system, the portal and shield equipment, random chitauri junk, things from the penthouse – so they could just be hidden. 

Cujo yipped and bounced over to where the warped panels of Stark’s landing platform jutted up from the roof and, yep, there was some red hair.  Black Widow was still alive.  Valerie wasn’t far off.  Still in her suit, she blended into Stark’s décor.  He couldn’t tell how hurt she was – he didn’t want to take off her suit or even her helmet for the same reason he didn’t want to move Dr. Selvig or Black Widow and couldn’t phase through it. 

Which left Tucker and Tony Stark. 

And Loki. 

“Danny.” 

Well, think of the devil…  “Loki,” said Danny, suddenly hyperaware of the scepters he was carrying. 

Loki, leaning against the side of the portal device casing, looked rather worse for wear.  His clothing was singed, and strange blue splotches marred his skin along with massive bags under his eyes. 

“Were you using an illusion to make yourself look better before?” he asked. 

Loki waved a lazy hand.  “Others do as much with paints and powders.  Why should I not use my natural gifts to do the same?  Stark and the boy are over there, by the by.” 

He pointed toward the penthouse with his chin, and Danny hurried over.  They were resting just inside where the big, full-length windows should have been.  It looked like Stark had thrown himself over Tucker to shield him… Or maybe that was just the blast.  Either way, he had a lot of painful-looking burns on his back, and the remaining parts of his armor looked scorched.  Maybe he’d been hit by whatever had singed Loki? 

After a few minutes of dithering, he did move Stark, because he was lying right on top of Tucker, who seemed to be having some trouble breathing.  He also pulled Tucker’s Fenton Phone out of his ear, but it was broken.  Whether that was because of something he did while he was Duulaman, or if escaping radiation – the electromagnetic pulse – from the nuke wiped it out, Danny couldn’t tell, but the inside was all burnt. 

But everyone was alive.  At least, everyone who was up here was alive.  Alive-ish, in his personal case.  He walked back out, and, oh, the green motes in the sky—All of those shields must have put enough ectoplasm into the air that it was condensing out as blob ghosts.  All the death today (enough that Danny could feel it on his skin) probably was helping with that, too.  New York was going to have a complicated ghost problem in the near future.

He should probably feel guilty about that, but he’d tried to keep this fight out of New York, tried to put it somewhere unpopulated, but…

“So,” he said, sitting down next to Loki.  The Tesseract cube sat unprotected on the ground only a meter or so from his feet.  It still reminded him of a blue raspberry ice pop, and he still had that weird impulse to lick it, but yeah.  No.  He wasn’t touching that at all.  “Looks like you and Barton were wrong about them not shooting a nuclear missile at a big city.”  He’d been wrong, too, but again, he’d been trying to put the portal somewhere else.

“I am not responsible for the foolish decisions of someone else’s government, only my own.”

“And how responsible for your own decisions have you been, lately?” asked Danny. 

Loki didn’t answer, instead choosing to look up at the sky.  Danny followed his gaze.  There were some ghosts there that weren’t blobs.  He thought he recognized Pandora coming closer, although she was a long way off. 

Danny sighed.  “How’d you get up here so fast, anyway?” 

“Well.  We did our very best to forget it, but this building does have more than one set of elevators.”

That was—Well, it was true, wasn’t it?  There was more than one elevator and—Danny tried to swallow his laughter.  It didn’t work.  Honestly, it wasn’t even that funny, but he couldn’t stop laughing.

“A nuclear bomb was about to drop on us,” he gasped, “and you took the elevator?”

“Would you have preferred that I took the stairs?”

Danny laughed harder. 

Chapter Text

It didn’t take Jazz long to figure out that all her controls were dead, and only a moment longer for her and Sam to conclude that all the electronics in the Ops Center were out of commission. 

“Must have been the EMP,” said Jazz. 

“I thought we were shielded against stuff like that,” said Sam.  “Against ectoradiation and everything.”

Jazz shrugged.  “Apparently not everything.  We’re a lot closer than anyone would expect to be, too.”

“That's true,” said Sam.  “No one expects to be at ground zero with these kinds of things.”

“Plus the, um,” said Jazz, her voice breaking a little, “the shields.  Who knows how radiation will act, refracted through all of that?  It’s… it's probably worse, closer to…”

“The building's still standing,” said Sam.  They’re fine.  They’ve got to be fine.”

“Right,” said Jazz.  “Right.  We should go down to Mom and Dad, see what they’re doing, if there’s any way to fix things…  Um, there should be some emergency flashlights…”

“Will those even work?”

“Uh, shorter circuits aren’t as vulnerable, and neither are things that are off,” said Jazz.  “Handheld things should be fine, mostly.  I think.  And the further from the blast the better.”

“But the Fenton Phones?”  Sam pulled hers out of her ear. 

“I don’t know.  We were managing the connections with the stuff here, so that might have done something.  It could be that the spectral noise filters got overloaded.  It could be that interacting with ectoplasm made it worse.  It could be a lot of stuff.  Ah!  Here!”  She threw a flashlight to Sam. 

Sam flicked the flashlight on and frowned at the green beam.  “Is this an anti-ghost flashlight?”

“I have no idea,” said Jazz.  “Probably.  You know how Mom and Dad are.”

“I guess Danny isn’t here to get his by it,” said Sam.  “Lead the way?”

“Yeah, so—”

“HEY, JAZZYPANTS!  WE’RE ALIVE!”  Dad scooped Jazz up in a giant hug. 

“Okay,” wheezed Jazz.  “Yep.  Okay.  I guess we don’t have to go find you.”

“Jazz, oh my goodness,” said Mom, joining the hug.  “Have you heard anything from your brother?  Tucker?”

“No,” said Jazz, wriggling.  “Our Fenton Phones are dead.”

“The spectral interference must have been too great,” said Mom.  “But we were hoping it wouldn’t have affected everything.”

“We’ll just have to improve our shields next time!” declared Dad.  “But we need to go find Danny, first!”

“Yeah,” said Sam.  “So, can we fly, now, or what?”

Mom shook her head.  “We’re going to have to go on foot.  We had a few blasters that were off that should be effective against the aliens.  Or any ghosts who decide--”

“Mom,” scolded Jazz.  “They came to help us, remember?”

Mom sighed.  “I know, sweetie.  It’s just in case.”

“Let’s go!” shouted Dad, yanking open a hatch and jumping down. 

Jazz took a blaster from her mother and followed him down. 

.

(The monsters the Hulk had been fighting had all gone limp.  He still made sure they wouldn’t be getting up, but it was obvious that the fight was over.  Somehow.)

(He stomped down the street.  There might be a fight that way, towards the tall tower.  But, in the meantime, he began to calm down.)

.

“Is everyone okay in here?” called Steve, addressing the whole subway platform.  It was illuminated only by emergency lighting and cell phone lights.  He cupped his hands around his mouth and tried again.  “Is everyone okay down here?” 

The crowd quieted, this time. 

“Alright, so, it looks like the fighting is mostly over,” he said.  “But there’s a lot of structural damage, and there’s still a lot of alien stuff.  So stay down here unless you have to leave, or if emergency responders come to get you.  I have to go—” The crowd exploded into questions.  “I have to go make sure that we really have won.”

.

“Hey!  Arrow boy!”

Clint did not jump, and he did not sigh.  He did not sigh at the nickname he’d been given by a bunch of high schoolers.  If anyone had a right to give him a stupid nickname, it was probably them, after all.

(However, if he ever ran into certain agents from his training days…  He might cherish the fact that they hadn’t come up with anything better than literal children.)

“Fentons,” he said, by way of greeting.  “Manson.”

He’d been on his way up, now that the storm had ended, and he couldn’t spot any more mobile enemies.  Reestablishing communications once an area was relatively secure was a priority. 

“Have you had any luck with your phone?” asked Maddie Fenton. 

“You mean--?”  He pointed at his ear.  “No.  Everything seems to be out.”  Including the electronics for his arrowhead loader, which was decidedly inconvenient, although not as inconvenient as it would have been before the sandstorm. 

“Do you think that’s why the aliens are down?” asked Sam.  “The thing with electronics, I mean.  They kind of had this biotech look going on.  Like, maybe they were all cyborgs.”

“Maybe,” said Clint.  “My hearing aid is working, though.”  He pointed at his opposite ear, the one he didn’t have the Fenton Phone in. 

“Huh,” said Jack.  “Cool!  But that’s small and non-ghostly, so there could be a few different factors there!  Good news for people with pacemakers, though!”

Yeah.  Clint didn’t even want to think about that.  Better for electronics to get knocked out than for a nuke to actually hit, but as someone who did rely on small electronics for a disability, however small, thinking about how many people might have died just from that made him feel vaguely nauseated.

Not that imagining the number of outright deaths from the invasion was any better. 

“Anywho!” said Jack.  “We’re on our way up to ol’ Stark Tower!  Got the Ops Center all locked up, so no spooks or ETs can get in!”

“Is that safe?” asked Clint.  “The bomb was right there,” he clarified.  The aliens and structural damage wasn’t something really avoidable under the present circumstances. 

“We’ve got a Geiger counter!” said Jack, waving a box. 

“It’s not on right now,” added Maddie.  “It was getting annoying.”

“Mom,” said Jasmine, “seriously?  What good is it if it isn’t on?”

“Well, it isn’t as if the number is going to change all that much while we’re in this building.  It will make more sense to turn it on once we’re on street level and it actually matters.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Clint.  “It was going off?  As in, we’re getting irradiated right now?”

“Everyone is getting irradiated all the time,” said Jazz.  “But that does sound like it’s more than usual.”

“It’s negligible,” said Maddie.  “Considering.  About what you’d expect from a commercial flight per hour.”

“Eh,” said Jack. 

“Eh?” repeated Clint.  That didn’t fill him with a huge amount of confidence.

“Come on,” said Sam, “astronauts get twenty times more than that and keep it up for days.”

“How do you know that?” asked Clint.  “Just off the top of your head like that?”

“Benefit of being friends with Danny,” she said, walking past him. 

“And to be honest,” said Maddie, “if you were near the Tesseract, you were probably experiencing astronaut levels of radiation.”

Clint sighed.  “I knew that,” he said.  “I was there when you talked to Dr. Selvig about it before Loki stole it.”

“Huh!  I don’t remember you being there at all!” 

Which was sort of the point.

“Are you coming with us or not, arrow boy?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming.”  He had to check on Natasha, after all… and all the other idiots… and he still felt guilty over what had happened with Danny.  Yeah.  He was coming. 

.

Bruce hated waking up in piles of rubble with no clothing.  However, this particular rude wake up call was… not so bad.  The city was, at least, still standing, and it looked like the aliens were all dead.

He got up and started walking towards Stark Tower.

.

In the end, it was Thor who found them first, launching up over the edge of the building and landing heavily.  He was followed closely by a ghost Loki couldn’t name. 

“Brother!” shouted Thor.  He stopped several yards away.  “Are you… well?”

“Well enough,” said Loki, not bothering to stand or even raise an arm in greeting.  He was exhausted.  And Thor was annoying to deal with. 

“Whelp,” said the ghost. 

“Skulker,” said Danny. 

There was a history, there, Loki could tell.  But he had neither the energy nor the will to delve into it. 

“Was it mind control, then?  Was it always?”

Loki laughed.  “When I lured those jotnar into Asgard, you mean?  When I sent the Destroyer after you?”  He had encountered Thanos before, but he hadn’t been caught, then, hadn’t been changed or reshaped… or so he’d thought.  “Who knows?” he settled on, finally. 

“What are you going to do?” asked Danny.  “You said something about bringing him back.  What would happen then?”

“I would face justice for my crimes,” said Loki, interrupting whatever Thor was about to say.  He said it better, anyway, and with the appropriate amount of sarcasm.

“You kind of did commit a lot of those,” observed Danny.  Then he shrugged.  “But, again, mind control.  Kind of an ‘either both of us are guilty or neither of us is’ kind of deal.”

“You aren’t Asgardian,” said Thor, nonplussed. 

“So?”

Thor shook his head and turned back to Loki.  “Father would understand if we ex—”

“Because he’s so willing to listen to explanations, is he?  He did not listen even to you.”  He tilted his head back and let out the breath he’d taken in to yell at his brother some more.  “It doesn’t matter.  It’s over.  It’s all over.  Take me back, kill me, leave me to rot in some human prison, I don’t care.”

“Brother—”

Danny cleared his throat.  “This is great and all, but no one else has woken up, and they definitely need some medical attention, so if one of you can get, like, a doctor or something…  I would, but this week has been really tiring and all the sleep I’ve gotten is, like, ten seconds of unconscious.”

“You were unconscious for longer than that,” said Loki. 

“Thanks, I didn’t ask.” 

The ghost groaned.  “Fine,” he said.  “But next time, whelp, it’ll be your skin.”

“He says that every time.”

“Loki, if you would say something to defend yourself,” said Thor, “I would listen.”                                                                                                                                       

“He totally was mind controlled,” said Danny.  “I’m, like, a mind-control connoisseur, so I’d know.”

“On this planet?” asked Thor, with just a touch of skepticism.  “With its technology?”

“It was ghost stuff,” said Danny.  “Overshadowing, you know?  But other stuff, too, like mind-vines and dream-helmets and body-swapping.  I hate body-swapping, it’s the worst.  Well, except for the emotion vampirism stuff.  The main time I got mind controlled before this, it was a staff, too, though!”

“That one?” asked Loki, tilting his head towards the staff ‘Duulaman’ had carried. 

“Nope.  Completely different staff.  I broke that one ages ago.”

“Oh, god,” groaned Selvig, having apparently dragged himself out of unconsciousness just in time to hear, “there’s another one?”

.

“Danny!  Baby, you’re alive!”

“Uh,” Danny said, having startled halfway out of Frostbite’s grip.  “Yep.  I’m alive.  As much as always.”  He settled back down as his family and friends – and Barton, who Danny decided to count as more of a coworker – emerged from Stark’s penthouse.  “Did you guys walk all the way from over there?” He nodded in the general direction he’d last seen the Ops Center in. 

“We took the stairs, too,” said Sam, sidling up behind Maddie and Jack, who were barely restraining themselves from throwing themselves at Danny due to Frostbite radiating severe disapproval.  “Since the elevators are all out, and did you know all the glass is gone where the sandstorm was?  Like, everywhere.  Even car windows and cell phones.

“Don’t remind me,” groaned Tucker, who was being checked over by not one but two yetis wearing medic symbols.

“What happened to you, anyway?” asked Sam. 

“It’s, uh—The thing.  With Duulaman.  The thing that—You guys tell her.”

“He’s experiencing dissonance between his current life and his past life!” said one of the yeti doctors.  “It is not terribly uncommon among persons who have reincarnated.”

“I hate this so much.  I hate being alive.”

“No, you don’t,” said Danny. 

“Ugh.  My thoughts are ugh.”

“He’s fine,” said Danny.  “Really.”

“Mhm,” said Jazz, who had a strong ‘I’m resisting the urge to psychoanalyze’ expression on her face.  “And what about this guy?”

“I do have a name,” said Loki, from where he was still slumped against the former Tesseract housing. 

“Mind control rule,” said Danny. 

“This happens often enough you have a rule for it?” asked Selvig.  Ever since he woke up, he’d been asking questions like that in a progressively more horrified tone.  Danny thought he might need therapy, honestly. 

“Well, yeah,” said Danny.  “Hello?  Any ghost here could overshadow you.”

“Not to mention guys like Undergrowth or Ember,” added Sam.

“Ooh, yeah, I forgot about the music-based mind control, earlier, thanks.

Jazz sighed.  “The rule is just that you can’t hold a grudge for things people do under mind control.”

“What!” said Barton.  “Then what do you keep calling me arrow boy for?”

“Oh,” said Jazz, breezily, “that’s for being involved in outing my brother to our parents.”

“Although,” said Maddie, “we really should have known beforehand.  And who are you?” 

This last was directed at Frostbite, and Danny sighed.  He sighed again when he noticed the distinct shape of Pandora getting closer.  “Okay, I guess I should do introductions.”

.

Tony (he insisted that they all call him Tony, something about life threatening situations) put down the tool he was using on the Iron Man helmet in his lap (not one he’d been using before, but one that had been sitting a back room in the penthouse) clapped his hands together.  “Okay, looks like we’re all here and all introduced! Question is, what do we do with that stuff, and what do we do with him?”  He gestured at the scepters in Danny’s lap, the Tesseract (still lying on the ground – Captain America had freaked when Black Widow went to pick it up), and Loki.  “Especially since SHIELD turned out to be run by Nazis—”

Danny jerked and almost dropped the scepters.  “It’s what?”

“That’s an exaggeration,” said Black Widow. 

“Fine, fine, it’s riddled with Nazis—”

“Why are there Nazis?  Aren’t they anti-Nazi?”

“They are,” said Black Widow, “but—”

“Oh my gosh,” said Sam.  “You can’t call a place full of Nazis anti-Nazi.  It just isn’t true.  Maybe they were supposed to be, but they aren’t anymore.  Get over it.  Also, they’re the ones who shot that nuke at us.”

“Uh,” said Danny.  “Then why are we okay with, like, that?” he pointed at the hovering shape of the SHIELD helicarrier. 

Tucker cleared his throat.  “They aren’t all Nazis.  I think.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s my understanding,” said Jazz loudly, “that SHIELD was infiltrated by HYDRA shortly after World War Two ended.  It’s currently unclear how many people in SHIELD are actually in HYDRA, pretending to be SHIELD.”

“But it’s a lot!” said Tucker.  “A whole lot!  And the GIW are in on it!”

“Oh, jeez,” said Danny.  “No wonder you didn’t follow that part of my plan.”  He ran his hands through his hair.  “I was going to suggest that we dump it all on them, but yikes.  Yikes.”

“Thor,” said Captain America, “I got the impression earlier that your people were familiar with this kind of… thing?” 

“Yes,” said Thor.  “Certain principles of its operation are not dissimilar to that of the Bifrost.”

“You wouldn’t mind taking it with you?”

“Not at all!”

“Great,” he said, sitting down for the first time since he’d gotten to the roof.  “Because I’d really like to get that thing off my planet.”

“Wow,” said Tony, “that sounds personal.  Is it personal?  Not just, you know, professional?”

“Stark.”

“Okay, okay, I’m backing off.  I’ll, uh, whip up something to carry that in, then?  I don’t suppose you know any of those principles of operation, huh, Thor?  Buddy?”

“It is not my, ah, area of expertise, but I will certainly do my best to assist.”

“I’ll need your help, too, Bruce.”

“Sure,” said Dr. Banner.  “Can’t be too hard, if they managed it in the forties.”

“Fentons?”

“At this point,” said Mom, “I think our time might be better spent dealing with the ectoradiation.  No, ah, offense.”

“None taken,” said Frostbite, kindly. 

“Frostbite can take my staff,” said Tucker. 

“Are you sure?” asked Danny.  “You did some really cool stuff with it before, you know.  The pyramids, and the sphinx, and the lightning thing—”

“I think that was me, actually,” said Thor, raising a finger. 

“I mean, you probably contributed,” allowed Danny, cheerfully. 

“Maybe the things were cool, but I can’t handle that.  Thing.  I can’t be trusted with it.  I went full megalomaniac.  I was going to conquer New York.  The whole east coast.  America.  The world.  Egypt.  Especially Egypt.  So, I want that power far, far away from me and my poor decision-making skills.”

“You realize,” said Loki, “that power is part of you?”

Tucker sat up, despite the protests of his doctors.  “What?”

“Perhaps the skill with which you wielded it belonged to your past life, and the magnitude of it to the staff, but nothing Duulaman accomplished is beyond your ability to learn.  It would be unimaginable, in fact, that you had not already begun to learn, simply from your experiences these past days.”

“Aw, man,” said Tucker, face crumpled into something complicated.  “Frostbite, you’ll still take it, right?”

“Of course!  We’ll keep it safe for you, as we do with all the artifacts we defend.”

“Then… Pandora, will you take this other staff?  I feel like it’s more up your alley.”

“Uh,” said Tony.  “One second.  I kind of feel like we should keep at least one superpowerful space weapon on Earth.  Just saying.”

Danny made a face at him.  “And you want to keep the mind control one?  The most easily abused?”

“Well,” said Loki, “I wouldn’t say it was easy to—”

“Hush, you,” said Pandora.  “Stark.  I have experience sealing away forces of evil.  But even if I did not, there is no reason for a ghost to want that thing.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t work on ghosts,” said Danny.

“It worked on you.”

“Yeah, when I was human.  As soon as I went ghost, it couldn’t control me anymore.”

“And we have much more efficient ways of controlling people, I’m sorry to say,” said Pandora.  “It would be safe, out of the hands of your enemy, and it would not be a temptation.”

“Nuclear deterrents and mutually assured destruction aren’t really things that have worked,” muttered Dr. Banner. 

Tony threw up his hands.  “Fine!  But the guy with the space army after us is still out there, the ‘protect the planet’ guys are secretly evil, and you guys aren’t sticking around, are you?”  He waved at Pandora and Frostbite. 

“No,” said Frostbite.  “We do have our own people to look after.  But I think you are not as bereft of resources as you believe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Yes,” said Loki, suspiciously, “do enlighten us.”

“Maybe it means you’re supposed to keep the band together,” said Danny.  “No Loki Ono.”

“Stop that.”

“I’d say make me but…  You can’t!” 

“Yeah, about that,” said Black Widow.  “I’ll have my hands full with the HYDRA problem.”

“Same,” said Barton.  “We’re not leaving Fury to deal with that.”

“What, do you think I don’t care about the HYDRA problem?”

“I think you care mostly about yourself, but sure.”

“Hey,” said Tucker, “he did put himself between me and an exploding shield thingy, so…”

“Okay,” muttered Danny to himself.  “Clearly, this band doesn’t need to be broken up.”

“Does that really surprise you?” asked Sam. 

“No, not really.”

The Iron Man helmet made a loud blaaaaaaat noise, followed by an awful lot of static.  “-ark, Rogers, Banner, Foley, Manson, Fentons, do any of you read this?” said… Danny frowned, trying to remember her name.  “Repeat: Barton, Romanov—”

“Hey, Agent Hill!” said Tony.  “Just got a radio up and running after you guys sent us that wonderful gift.  You know, the one that was going to kill us all.  Anyway, how are you?  Old one-eye and Agent Coulson doing alright with the whole situation?”

“Coulson is dead.”

“What?” said Tony.  “He’s—How?”

“He was killed by HYDRA agents while trying to keep the plane with the missile from taking off.” 

“Oh,” said Tony, blankly.  “He—Oh.”

“What we found with Foley’s backdoor is this:  Every level of SHIELD is compromised.  Everything that SHIELD touches is compromised.  We’re handling things here on the helicarrier, but it’s going to be a different story everywhere else.”

“What can we do to help?” asked Captain America. 

“Get the situation in the city under control and go to ground if you can.  That’s not going to work for Stark, but the rest of you—”

“It isn’t going to work for us, either,” interrupted Danny.  “I can’t leave Amity Park undefended.”

“Then you’ll have to make your own decisions.  Don’t try to contact anyone from SHIELD, and if anyone from SHIELD contacts you, be cautious.  Don’t blindly trust it if Fury or I contact you, for that matter.  We have technologies under development that make the Mission Impossible masks look tame.  Barton, Romanov, consider any safehouses or contacts known to SHIELD to be burned.” 

“Roger that,” said Black Widow. 

“That’s… expected,” said Barton.  “If not great.”

“We’ll try to send updates through Stark, if he stays in public view, but we can’t make any guarantees.  Fury says, ‘Don’t die, and… good work, Avengers.’”

The connection dissolved back into static. 

“Okay!” said Stark, rubbing his eyes not-at-all subtly.  “Looks like you’re all getting new identities for Christmas.”  He looked at Sam.  “Hanukkah?”

“My family doesn’t really do presents.  And I’m not running.”

“Wait,” said Valerie.  “You can do that?”

“Sure.  I’m rich.  I can do whatever I want.  Mostly.”  This declaration was accompanied by more unsubtle eye-rubbing. 

“And HYDRA isn’t a joke,” said Black Widow.  “Torture, murder, human experimentation.  It’s all on the table, if they catch you.”

“If they catch me,” said Sam.  “Trust me, once we’re all back in Amity Park, we’ll have one hell of a home field advantage.  And I think Coulson was the only one besides you guys and Fury who knew Valerie even existed.”

“That’s accurate,” said Valerie.  “I think.”

“Mom, Dad?” said Jazz.  “What do you think?  You’ve been quiet.”

“We can’t leave the portal,” said Mom, after a moment.  “The rest of our research we could move.”  Her eyes tracked over to the rooftop the Ops Center sat on.  “But not the portal.”

Danny relaxed a little more.  Obviously, he could deal with being hunted by evil superspies (see: the past week) even without access to his full powerset.  Coping with his parents trying to put them in DIY witness protection would be significantly harder. 

“Okay.  New identities for, like, half of us.  And I have tons of properties through shell—”

“SHIELD knows about those,” said Black Widow. 

“Aren’t you cheerful.  Anyway, any requests about names?  Backstories?  You don’t want to give me too much creative control, I’ll turn you into a traveling circus or something.  Wouldn’t be able to resist.”

“I wouldn’t mind being back in the circus,” said Barton. 

“Didn’t they kick you out for shooting someone?” asked Black Widow. 

“Yes, they did.”

“Hey, uh,” said Dr. Banner, “I hate to be the one to say this, but aren’t we forgetting someone?”  He pointed awkwardly at Loki. 

Tony shrugged.  “Isn’t he just going back with Thor?”

“No,” said Thor. 

“No?” repeated Loki, incredulous.  “What do you mean no?”

“I’d like to know the reasoning behind that as well,” said Black Widow.  “We can’t trust any governments here to hold him with HYDRA’s involvement.”

“And why should he be held at all?” 

“What,” said Loki, flatly.

“Have we not determined that he is innocent, at least in this matter?  That he was put under a geas, just as Phantom was?  That he even fought it, as Phantom did?  And we have agreed, most emphatically, that Phantom is innocent.”

“I—” started Loki, half-smiling.  “You—” The expression slid into something closer to bewilderment.  “You cannot be serious, brother.  Did Odin not send you here to drag me back to Asgard like a recalcitrant child?”

“He did,” said Thor, “and yet… What you said about Father and… listening… is not untrue.  He was wroth, when I left, and only Mother’s words stayed his temper.”

Captain America let out a sigh.  “I guess we’re the closest thing to a jury he’s likely to get.  Danny, are you sure he was mind controlled?”

“As sure as I can get without overshadowing him myself and poking around,” said Danny, shrugging.  “Do you want me to--?”

“No.”

“If I may offer my medical opinion,” said Frostbite, “I would concur with the Great One’s thoughts.  Mister Loki does exhibit many of the symptoms expected of victims of prolonged control.” 

Loki pushed himself up.  “What are you doing?  What about justice?  What about punishment and vengeance?”

Danny squinted at him.  “Do you, like, want to get punished, or…?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Loki, wobbling as he looked down his nose at Danny.  “A child like you wouldn’t understand.”

“So, we’re agreed then?  We’re just going to let him loose to go do… whatever?”  Tony didn’t seem particularly pleased about that, but then, this wasn’t a particularly pleasant situation. 

“Tips on the guy with the space army might be appreciated,” said Barton.  “Just a thought.”

“Or, ooh!” said Danny.  “You could come back to Amity Park with us and teach Tucker magic.”  He waggled his fingers. 

“Absolutely not,” said Loki.  “I am leaving.”  He turned to walk away and immediately tripped over the Tesseract. 

“Maybe you should wait until you’re not drunk to do that,” suggested Danny. 

“I really need to make a container for that,” said Tony, standing up and disappearing into the penthouse.  “And don’t go until I can get you a phone or something!  I need to pick your brain about aliens!”

“Oh, yeah,” said Danny.  “You guys definitely owe me facts about aliens.  I can’t believe I was abducted by an alien and got, like, zero space facts out of it.  That’s criminal.”

“It kind of is,” agreed Sam. 

“If that’s criminal,” said Valerie, “what about my ghost facts?  Like, you know, the fact that you’re a ghost.”

“It is something we’d like clarification on, too, sweetie,” said Maddie. 

“Ah,” said Danny.  He wondered if he could escape this conversation by phasing through the roof.  Maybe he’d even be nice and take Loki with him. 

“I think I’ve been pretty understanding,” continued Valerie, “putting off my questions, but if you’re all going to go on a tangent about space, well, I think my questions are pretty important, too!  Especially since it looks like I’m not going to get paid for this after all!”

Tony wandered back out onto the roof.  “So, I was going to offer you guys a drink, but, shockingly, alcohol is generally stored in glass, so I was thinking, once the doctors get everyone patched up, we could go out for-- Why do I suddenly feel like I walked in on the season finale of a soap opera?”

“Danny and Valerie used to date,” explained Jazz. 

“She’s also worried about not getting paid,” added Sam, rolling her eyes. 

“Hey, people have to live,” said Tucker.  “Not everyone can be rich.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Tony.  “Of course you’re getting paid.  I’ll pay you.  It’s like, volunteer firefighters get paid, right?  But I’m way cooler than the government, so you’ll actually get a living wage.  Also, is he just going to keep lying on the floor like that, or what?”

“I believe he may have fallen asleep,” said Thor, bemused. 

Danny leaned forward to get a better look.  That wasn’t a terrible conclusion, but…  Danny could see the slight shimmer around the edges that gave away an illusion.  It was kind of a jerk move on Loki’s part, but Danny couldn’t scrounge up the energy to blame him. 

Should he say something?

Nah.  But it did give him an idea.

“Well,” said Danny, laughing a little, “neither of us have slept for days.  Did I mention that before?  Speaking of which… maybe I’ll take a nap, too…”  He leaned back and closed his eyes. 

The anti-nap protest was hilarious, but he didn’t hear much of it.  He was too busy napping.

.

“So, where do you think Loki is?” asked Valerie as they finally drove back into Amity Park. 

It had taken a while to get the Ops Center off that roof, even with the help of superpowers, and longer still to get a hold of a semi-truck that could haul it back home, even with the help of Tony Stark’s wallet.  The less said about wannabe supervillain road pirates and attempted assassinations at rest stops the better. 

The first few days on the road, the conversation had been firmly of the ‘interrogating Danny’ variety, with short digressions into ‘interrogating Jazz,’ ‘interrogating Sam,’ and ‘interrogating Tucker.’  But there were only so many things to say before they got to stuff they really, really didn’t want to talk about while trapped with each other in a mobile metal box hundreds of miles from home.  After reaching that point, there had been a brief period of ‘interrogating Valerie,’ but that didn’t go over very well, so the rest of the time had been spent speculating about the evil space army that was possibly coming for Earth (depressing), and what Loki was doing (slightly less depressing).

“Defrauding Las Vegas,” said Danny, without hesitation.  He didn’t think that’s what he’d actually be doing, but it was definitely the funniest possible option.

“Does he even know what Las Vegas is?” asked Tucker, curiously.  “I mean, he’s only been on Earth for, what, a week and a half, and you guys spent a bunch of that time in Europe, right?”

Danny shrugged, not taking his eyes off the window, drinking in the sight of his haunt.  “I’m sure he’ll figure it out.”

.

“Tony, what are you doing?” asked Pepper, walking up behind him and setting a glass of wine down on the table next to him.  Well.  ‘Glass.’  Glass goods were at a bit of a premium in New York at the moment, and Tony’s main wealth flex after supplying Barton, Natasha, Steve, and Bruce with new IDs had been getting the Amity Parkers on their way back home.  The wine itself was from a box.

“Redesigning a few floors,” said Tony.  “If we’re keeping the band together, we need a place to hang out, record, you know the drill.”

“I thought you hated the boy band metaphor.”

Tony shrugged.  “It’s grown on me.  Should I put all the kids on one floor, or should I separate them out?”

“I thought you hated that they were involved,” said Pepper, raising her eyebrows. 

“I do,” said Tony, “But do you think I can stop them?  I can’t even stop me.”

“Here, let me see.”  She scanned the blueprint, then frowned.  “Is that a floor for Loki?”

“Kind of figure the guy might show back up, once he’s done defrauding Las Vegas or whatever.”

“Defrauding Las Vegas, really?”

“Hey, it’s what I’d do,” said Tony.  “Minus, you know, the fraud part.  Counting cards is an art.”

Pepper laughed and kissed him on the cheek.  “Well, if you’re going to put Clint here, can I suggest…?”

.

“I hate to say it,” said Steve, casually concussing another HYDRA agent, “but I don’t think I’m really cut out for covert operations.”

“No, no,” said Natasha, “you’re doing great.”

“Yeah!” said Clint, nocking another arrow.  “You’re perfect bait!  All of these guys hate you so much, it’s funny.”

Fury, who was also on comms, if not on location, sighed.  His agents didn’t use to be so talkative during missions.  He blamed this on Stark.

.

As a point in fact, Loki did not know what Las Vegas was, and he wasn’t there, defrauding it or otherwise. 

He was in the kitchen of the apartment Tony had bought for Bruce, going through his refrigerator. 

“What,” said Bruce, willing the green tint out of his skin, “are you doing here?”

“As your friends so kindly pointed out to me, I am a free man.  I go where I will.”

“Yeah, freedom generally doesn’t include breaking and entering.”

“More’s the pity.”  He closed the refrigerator and leaned against the counter.  His eyes were sharp.  “I looked into you, you know.  I meant to use you as a weapon, a way to peel apart your allies.  To turn your other nature against yourself.”

“That’s… nice,” said Bruce, tensing just a little. 

“How do you keep it at bay?  All that… anger?”

“What do you care?”

Loki looked away.  “My grip on Danny’s mind was the thing of a moment.  When it broke, it broke cleanly.”  His fingers traced over the handles in Bruce’s knife block before coming to rest flat against the countertop again.  “The same cannot be said for me.”

Bruce realized, then, what Loki was asking him.  “Oh boy.  Yeah.  Let’s head over to the living room.  We can talk.”

.

.

.

.

.

.

Loki was not, and never had been, a good man. 

He wasn’t doing this because he cared, or because he felt guilty.  The purpose of his visit here was only to satisfy his curiosity.  To, perhaps, explore the secrets of this world as he had once explored those of Asgard.  That was all. 

After all, he had no duty to Danny Fenton, nor any particular affection.  They’d only known each other for a few short days, and it had been months since then.  So, it gave him no comfort, no ease, to see him walking down the street, smiling.  It was no thrill, to see him pause, turn, and smile at Loki, despite the disguise he wore. 

Loki had never been a particularly honest man, either. 

But what was life, without its little lies?