Raina's gaze dropped to the ash spread across the storage room floor, then moved to Smith and Tony.
"Strucker's people took us for experiments," she said. "He was using the Obelisk to find individuals who could survive the Terrigen exposure and awaken. If you hadn't arrived, I wouldn't have had the opportunity I had."
She let the rest of it go unsaid.
The air in the storage room seemed to compress by a half-degree. Gordon materialized in the gap between Raina and the two men, the displacement leaving a faint pressure shift that Tony felt at the back of his sinuses. Gordon turned to face Smith and Tony.
Tony, out of armor and in his operational underlayer, dropped into a fighting stance before the thought had fully formed.
Smith looked at Gordon and stayed still.
Gordon registered Smith Doyle and adjusted his posture — weight redistributed, shoulders settling back. The strength alone would have been sufficient, but the adjustment carried more weight than that. Smith had been the one who settled the account with the people responsible for what had happened to Jiaying. The Afterlife community held that fact in a specific regard.
"You know him?" Tony said, watching the shift happen.
"Afterlife Inhumans," Smith said. "Skye's community. He's one of theirs."
Tony ran through the tournament's participant list and arrived at a name. He looked at Gordon directly. "Her people." A beat. "So what are you doing here?"
Gordon kept his attention on Raina, who stood behind him with the Obelisk's case at her back. "She experienced an unexpected awakening. I tracked the signal." He looked at Smith. "I've come to take her home."
"She was operating with HYDRA," Tony said. The casual edge was gone from his voice. "There are a dozen more enhanced outside who were doing the same thing. Are you telling me you're connected to that?"
Gordon turned to Tony fully. "Jiaying has a history with HYDRA that makes the word 'enemies' insufficient. No one from the Afterlife wants to work with them voluntarily." He paused. "If she's been working with HYDRA, tell me now. I'll resolve it myself or hand her to you. Your choice."
"I am not HYDRA," Raina said. Her voice was flat and even. "I killed their leader. The ash on the floor is proof."
Smith looked at Gordon. "Take her. Her ability will need preparation on your end — it's not what you're used to encountering." He looked at Raina. "The Obelisk stays. It belongs to SHIELD."
Gordon's attention went to the case behind Raina and held there for two seconds. Then: "Raina. Set it on the floor."
Raina placed the case on the ground.
"Non-Inhumans can't touch it safely," Gordon said, looking back at Smith. "You'll need containment."
Smith reached out and enclosed the Obelisk — case and all — in a compression of Space stone energy. The absorption was instantaneous, the Obelisk gone from the visible world without ceremony.
Gordon looked at the space where it had been. His face gave nothing. He didn't ask.
"I'll take her back now." He turned to Raina and extended his hand. "Please hold on."
Raina took it.
They were gone before Tony had finished registering the departure. The room felt larger, suddenly, and fractionally colder.
"I noticed he doesn't have eyes," Tony said, after a moment. "I'm choosing not to ask right now."
"He navigates through sensory fields," Smith said.
"Right." Tony looked at the ceiling, then back down at the ash. "You mentioned Skye has a community of people like that."
Smith explained the structure as they moved back through the passage — the Afterlife base, the Inhumans as a genetic lineage, the Kree origin, the nature of the transformation. Tony listened without interrupting, which was not his default position.
"The Kree were here that early," he said, when Smith finished. "And we were the experimental subjects." He turned it over for a moment. "If they'd come back and found it worked—"
"They didn't," Smith said. "And the people who stopped them made sure of it."
"Still." Tony glanced sideways at him. "The Earth has a lot of secrets."
"Yes."
"Not all of which I find comforting."
Outside the base.
"Clint took bad burns," Natasha said, coming up to Steve and Thor. There was blood on her jacket that wasn't hers, dried dark at the collar. "I've done what I can. He needs to be on the plane."
Thor was already moving toward the extraction point. "I'll take him." He looked back at Steve. "Smith and Stark have been inside for a while. I expect there's nothing left standing."
Steve listened to the base. The weapons fire had stopped entirely. "Sounds right."
Banner hadn't finished. The Hulk didn't always receive a clean notification that the engagement was over, and in the absence of anything immediate to respond to, he'd redirected his attention to a section of wall that had simply been in the wrong place.
Natasha walked over and put herself in his line of sight.
"Hulk." She waited until the green eyes found hers. "The fight's done. Betty's waiting."
The Hulk was many things. One of them was someone who responded to that name with a stillness that no shield or hammer had managed to produce. He stood there with his hands at his sides, and something in the shape of his face changed — not softening exactly, but rearranging itself around a different center of gravity.
Ross had spent years trying to separate Banner from Betty and found that his daughter's position on the subject was not subject to revision. Watching Banner become controllable because of a single consistent human relationship had eventually moved Ross from active opposition to grudging tolerance.
The Hulk handed the controls back. Banner arrived, considerably smaller, wearing the oversized trousers that had become the team's standard solution to a recurring logistical problem.
Natasha smiled slightly. "Every time."
"She has that effect," Banner said.
Tony spent the remainder of the sweep cataloguing acquisitions: a Chitauri leviathan carcass, salvaged and suspended in the base's main research bay; three HYDRA energy weapon prototypes; biological sample storage that would need SHIELD's full containment protocols.
"SHIELD can catalog this," Smith said, moving through it. "Too much to prioritize."
"Agreed. I'm just making sure I know what's here." Tony looked up at the leviathan. "They actually got one of those."
"SHIELD will send a team."
"Fair enough." Tony lifted his faceplate. "Jarvis, confirm data extraction complete."
"Complete. All experimental records have been copied and transmitted to SHIELD headquarters. Director Smith's office has been flagged for review."
"Then we're done." Smith looked around the empty bay. "Strucker's gone. This is HYDRA's last significant operational base."
Tony let that settle. "That's a sentence I didn't think I'd hear."
En route. The plane.
Barton was horizontal on a stretcher, an IV line running, the overhead cabin lights making the burns across his ribs look worse than they were. Or possibly accurately.
Smith came forward from the cockpit end of the plane and looked at him. "I've contacted Dr. Helen Cho. She has a piece of technology that should get you back on your feet faster than the standard recovery protocols."
Barton's expression moved toward suspicion. "Wax bath?"
"Better. The Regeneration Cradle."
Tony settled into the seat across from him. "Quick math for you, Clint — that treatment pod Smith has? Three hundred million dollars. You'll be paying that back across multiple generations of Bartons. Could be a legacy item."
Barton did the math and visibly decided against it. "Then Dr. Cho it is. I assume I still have a wax bath quota from last time."
"You do," Smith confirmed.
"Then Dr. Cho, and if she can't do it, the wax bath. In that order."
Tony handed him a drink. "Enjoy your last moments as a man made of original materials."
Banner had found a seat near the back of the cabin, headphones on, his reflection caught faintly in the dark window beside him.
Natasha came and sat nearby. She waited until he took the headphones off.
"She's good for you," she said. "The Hulk responds to her name the way he doesn't respond to anything else."
"Hulk has feelings," Banner said. "They're large and not always convenient, but they're real." He looked at his hands — still slightly oversized, the knuckles slow to settle back. "Betty is my person. I think he knows that too."
Smith walked over. "When are you marrying her?"
Banner looked up.
"Her father is going to be running for office soon," Smith said. "The longer you wait, the more complicated the guest list becomes."
Natasha: "Think about the headlines. 'President's son-in-law.'"
"We have some challenges," Banner said carefully. "In terms of the relationship being anything more than—" He paused. "We're in a Platonic arrangement currently. By necessity."
The cabin registered this in the same moment and made several unsuccessful attempts not to react to it.
"Soon," Banner said, into the resulting silence.
Avengers Tower. Rooftop.
Sharon Carter and Dr. Helen Cho were waiting at the landing pad when the plane touched down, the city spread out below the parapet in early evening light, windows starting to come on in the towers across the river.
Barton came off on the stretcher, and Sharon boarded immediately.
"Lab is set up, sir."
Smith nodded. He looked at the building, then at Tony. "Thank you for providing the space."
Tony made a modest gesture that conveyed absolutely no modesty. "I just built it, designed it, funded it, and made everyone look better by association." A pause. "Two Avengers bases. We're doing well."
Smith gave him a thumbs up. "The SHIELD consulting arrangement continues to pay off."
Tony appeared to consider this a fair assessment and said nothing.
Smith turned to Sharon. "The intelligence from the base — what did we get?"
Sharon pulled up the tablet. "Strucker's death warriors were sourced from a HYDRA-controlled manufacturing operation. Cybernetically enhanced soldiers — prosthetic targeting eyes, body armor modeled on Chitauri soldier specifications, performance enhanced via modified centipede serum." She scrolled. "Additionally, they'd done significant research on the Obelisk — awakening protocols, Inhuman genetic screening methodology. That data is already in the SHIELD system and it's going to be useful."
Steve had been standing at the parapet, listening. "Inhumans," he said. "I keep hearing that term."
Sharon glanced toward where Smith had been standing and found he'd already moved to the elevator. She looked back at Steve. "Enhanced individuals with a specific genetic origin. Different from enhancement that comes through serum or external modification — it's built into their biology." She offered him the tablet. "As long as there's an Obelisk and the right genetic profile, the ability activates."
Steve took the tablet and looked at the data for a moment, the city noise drifting up from below.
"A blessed race," he said, handing it back. "I can only imagine how many people would want what they have."
He stepped into the elevator.
Tony's lab. Lower level.
The Iron Legion returned in formation, the drones filing into their maintenance bays with mechanical precision while Jarvis ran the damage assessment in the background, numbers cycling through the display columns at the far end of the lab.
Tony stood in front of the Ultron display — not the finished version, not yet, but far enough along that the shape of the thing was fully resolved in his mind. The architecture was there. The recursive learning protocols were in place. The defensive AI core was complete.
One step.
"Jarvis." Tony set his drink down and looked at the display. "Let's get to work. Smith's going to be surprised."
Medical suite.
Barton was on the treatment surface with his shirt off, the burns across his side a raw red-brown against pale skin. Dr. Helen Cho worked near him, her instruments precise and unhurried.
"The molecular bridge assists your cells in forming a new dermal layer over the burned tissue," she said. "The biomimetic integrates with your existing cell structure at the boundary level. Your body doesn't register it as foreign material."
Banner had pulled a stool close and leaned forward with the full weight of his attention on the process. "Artificial biological tissue. Actual integration at the cellular boundary." He looked at Cho. "How long have you been working on this?"
"A long time." She adjusted the instrument without looking up. "The full Regeneration Cradle takes twenty minutes for injuries at this level. What I can do here in the field is slower, but the principle is identical."
Smith said: "Bulma would want to see this. You two should talk."
Natasha: "Bulma runs the Capsule Corporation. Treatment technology is adjacent to her core work."
Smith nodded. "She approaches medicine from an engineering angle, but she gets there. The treatment pod and the Regeneration Cradle probably share more than the surface suggests."
Dr. Cho stopped working. She set the instrument down on the tray and looked at Smith directly and held that for a moment before she spoke. "I'd like to speak with her."
Tony walked in with a drink in each hand, looked at Barton on the treatment surface, and arranged his face into theatrical concern. "Time of death? Just so we have a record."
"Tony," Smith said.
"He's fine, I can tell he's fine." Tony set a drink near Barton's hand. "There you go. Stay hydrated while you become a new man."
"I'm made of plastic," Barton said, looking at his hand where the new tissue was forming.
"You're made of your own cells, Mr. Barton," Dr. Cho said, without looking up. "The biomimetic becomes indistinguishable from native tissue within seventy-two hours."
Barton appeared to find this only marginally reassuring.
Dr. Cho looked at Tony. "This is the direction medicine is going. The armor is impressive. It's going to seem very large and mechanical by comparison, in about ten years."
Tony smiled. "That's the goal. We want everything to seem large and mechanical by comparison. It makes the armor look better." He looked at Smith. "There's a party on Saturday. Helen, you're coming."
"I have work," she said.
"Bring the work. Smith will bring Bulma. You can talk shop in a social environment, which is how normal people do it."
Dr. Cho considered this for a moment, her attention still on the instrument in her hand. "If Bulma is going to be there — yes. But I'm there for the exchange, not the party."
Smith smiled. "Noted."