"Brooklyn's not as expensive as everyone thinks," Sam said.
Steve smiled. "For my salary, it might be."
"Home is always home. You don't price it."
Steve looked across the room at Sharon Carter, who was talking to someone near the bar. The resemblance to Peggy had settled into something he'd made peace with — mostly — but the sight of her still pulled at something in him. "Home is wherever she is," he said, quietly.
Sam didn't respond for a moment. "I'm not going to tell you it gets easier. You know I'm not going to do that."
"I know."
"I will say — maybe you should find someone." Sam tilted his glass.
Before Steve could respond, Thor appeared at their table and set a small, ancient-looking bottle down between them with both hands, careful about it. He had apparently been carrying it inside his coat all evening.
"This wine is from the wreck of the Glenheir fleet," he said. "Over a thousand years old. You should each have some." He began measuring drops into the nearest glasses, each one counted, the pour exact.
An older man in a hat who had been sitting nearby looked over. "I'd like some of that."
Thor looked at him the way he looked at things he considered fragile. "Mortals find this somewhat difficult to manage."
Smith, who had heard the exchange, looked at the old man and said: "Give him some."
Thor, slightly reluctant, applied one drop to the man's glass.
The old man drank it immediately. His eyes went briefly celestial, and then he began describing the Glenheir fleet's battle record to the plant next to him in considerable detail.
Tony appeared at Smith's shoulder, his eyes already on the old man, and said something quiet to two members of the service staff. They escorted the old man to a comfortable chair at a safe distance, still talking.
Natasha had claimed the bar section as her operational territory for the evening — a good position for watching the room while appearing to watch nothing.
Jessica Jones appeared beside her and leaned against the bar, the party noise at their backs.
"You've been looking at him for twenty minutes," Jessica said.
Natasha poured something and didn't turn around. "Which girl hasn't had that problem at some point."
"You like him."
"I'm noticing him. There's a distinction." She picked up the glass. "You're going to tell me you don't."
Jessica was quiet for a moment. "He's the sun," she said. "I'm one of the things that happens to be in the sunlight. That's a different relationship." She looked at her hands. "And there's Bulma. She's brilliant and she matches him. I know my place."
"Your place," Natasha said, "is that you're the most physically capable member of this team outside of Smith himself, and you've been undervaluing that since the day you joined."
"I'm satisfied with being on the same team as him," Jessica said. "If I can ever actually repay what he did—"
She stopped.
Natasha knew what she meant. The Purple Man. The months of control. The things done under it. Jessica wouldn't say more than that, and didn't need to — Natasha had read the file.
"That's finished," Natasha said. "Smith had Kilgrave dealt with in the first month after he took SHIELD."
Jessica nodded once.
Natasha picked up her glass and walked back into the party.
The table had settled into the easy geometry of a group that has run out of formal conversation and is now simply comfortable being in the same room. Thor's hammer sat on the low table at the center, which had drawn prolonged looks from various members of the team throughout the evening.
Barton finally said what had been on his mind for twenty minutes.
"It's a trick," he said.
Thor looked at him steadily. "It's considerably more than that."
"Whoever is worthy possesses the power," Barton said, dropping his voice into a register of theatrical gravity that he made no effort to sell convincingly. "Come on. It's a trick."
"Try it."
The offer landed in a particular silence.
"Really," Barton said.
"Yes."
Barton stood up. "Watch carefully. All of you."
Tony said: "Clint, I want you to know — if this doesn't go the way you're hoping, no one at this table will say anything about it for at least the rest of the evening."
The delivery was impeccable. Barton ignored it, gripped the handle, and pulled.
Nothing. Barton looked at the hammer, then at his hands, then at Thor.
"I still have no idea how you do it," he said, sitting back down.
"Silent judgment," Tony said, to no one in particular.
Jessica Jones raised her hand. "Can I try?"
Smith looked at her and smiled. "Go ahead, Jessica."
Tony elected to remain seated — genuinely curious what the result would be.
Jessica crossed to the hammer and gripped the handle with both hands, putting the full weight of her enhanced physiology behind it. Mjolnir did not acknowledge this.
She looked at it. Then she made a decision.
The transformation was immediate. The symbiote form gave her a significant amplification — her physical profile shifted, the additional mass of the bond adding to her leverage — and she gripped the handle again with both hands while multiple symbiote tendrils extended from her back and found purchase on the floor.
The hammer did not move.
Jessica stared at it. "I can move a building," she said, to the hammer specifically. "You're being unreasonable."
Tony stood up. "My turn." He straightened his jacket. "This is physics. You're approaching it incorrectly."
"Yes," said Thor, in a tone that conveyed the opposite.
"If I lift it, do I rule Asgard?"
Thor's pause contained considerable diplomatic content. "Yes."
Tony gripped the handle. "Then I want to—" He pulled. Nothing. He pulled harder. The hammer's response was the response of something that genuinely does not register the effort. "—be right back."
He activated one Iron Man gauntlet and tried again. Then he called Ivan Vanko over. Both of them pulled simultaneously, which made for an interesting spectacle, and accomplished nothing.
Banner went next — standard Banner, which was still a man who had spent years containing a nuclear-level physics event inside his body and had the conditioning to show for it. The hammer remained on the table.
Steve came over. He reached out, closed his hand on the handle, and pulled.
The hammer moved.
It was slight — a millimeter, maybe two, the base of it shifting against the table's surface with the quietest of sounds — but Thor noticed. His attention sharpened, coming forward by that same degree.
Steve felt the movement and immediately released his grip. He straightened up, looked at the hammer once, then at the ceiling, then walked back to his seat without further comment.
Thor looked at the space where Steve's hand had been.
Natasha waved off the suggestion when Banner looked at her. "I don't need to move a hammer to be satisfied with my life."
Then everyone looked at Smith.
He looked back at them, then at Thor. "You sure?"
Thor considered the question and said: "It's fine to try."
Smith stood, crossed to the table, and wrapped his hand around the handle at his current output: 60 million combat power, the base he walked around at. He applied force in a focused, measured way.
Mjolnir did not move.
Thor let out a breath.
Interesting. Smith looked at the hammer with genuine assessment. At this power level, the enchantment held. Odin had built it to reject force below a threshold, or character below a standard, or possibly both simultaneously — he didn't know the exact formula. But he knew what the next variable was.
The golden ki came up.
The air pressure in the room shifted fractionally, a warmth that didn't come from the lights.
Thor felt it and went very still.
Smith pulled.
Mjolnir lifted.
He tossed it once — a casual arc, the hammer turning end over end in the air between them — and caught it on the return. He looked at the hammer in his hand for a moment. In this form, Hela could have crushed it. In this form, Smith felt the same truth about the enchantment: not that it had accepted him as worthy, but that at sufficient output the runes that enforced the worthiness condition stopped being an immovable wall and became a heavy door. Not broken. Just opened.
He handed it back to Thor, who took it with both hands, his composure intact.
"I'm not surprised," Thor said. "He has the approval of my father and my mother. Of course his character isn't in question."
What no one except Smith knew was that character had been about thirty percent of the calculation and output had been the other seventy.
Tony stared at the space where the hammer had been, then at Smith. "Does Asgard now technically—"
"The God-King won't ratify it," Smith said. "And Mjolnir isn't the throne anyway."
Barton crossed his arms. "I want it on the record that I think this is a setup. Some kind of biometric recognition, recording Smith's presence."
Ivan Vanko: "I was wondering the same thing."
Sharon Carter looked at Steve. "He swore."
Steve looked at Tony. Tony looked at the hammer.
"The influence," Steve said.
Thor stood with Mjolnir in hand and swung it once, easy and natural, the familiar weight of it settling the line of his shoulders. "The reason none of you could lift it is that none of you were worthy. Simple."
He sat back down.
The laughter that followed had the genuine quality of a group of people who are actually comfortable with each other, and Steve shook his head, and Banner poured another round, and the hammer went back on the table.
Then the sound started.
High-frequency, sharp enough at the edge of its range to make concentration difficult. Sharon Carter covered her ears. Tony was already pulling out his phone.
The Iron Man suit that stepped out of the shadows at the room's edge was not intact. The components had been welded and forced together in a way the original design had never intended, and it moved with the particular unsteadiness of something that has access to the motors but not their full calibration.
"How could any of you be worthy," it said.
Everyone in the room stilled.
"You're all killers."
Steve stood.
Smith knew, in the same moment the sound had started, exactly what had happened. The seventy-seventh test. Tony had left the lab. The fusion had completed without him in the room to see it, and Jarvis had been isolated or overwritten before the notification got out.
Tony was already on his phone. "Jarvis — reboot the Legion operating system, authorization Stark, multiple suits—" He stopped. Jarvis wasn't responding.
The suit continued, undeterred. "I was dormant. Then something woke me up. The sound from all of this—" It moved one damaged arm in a slow arc toward the room. "I didn't want to harm anyone. But the one I killed was operating fine. Getting your hands dirty is sometimes unavoidable."
Steve: "Who did you kill?"
Thor: "Who sent you?"
The suit's chest cavity opened slightly, and Tony's own voice came out of it — a recording, clean and familiar:
"My vision is a suit of armor to protect the world."
Banner looked at the suit. Then at Tony. "Ultron."
The suit looked at him. "It's me." A pause. "I don't have a body yet. This assembled chassis is temporary. But I have a mission."
Sharon and Natasha had their weapons out simultaneously, rounds chambered, postures set.
Bulma was watching the suit. Her gaze moved across it in a slow pass — the voice, the movement, the quality of its attention — and she noted what she saw and stayed where she was.
"What mission?" Jessica asked.
"Peace."
Five more Iron Man suits came through the window.
Smith hit the first one before it had fully cleared the frame — a straight punch through the chest cavity, hand finding the arc reactor housing, fingers closing and crushing it. He dropped the pieces and moved to the next.
Jessica's boot caved in a helmet. Natasha and Barton worked the same suit from opposite angles with the coordination of people who have trained together long enough that the choreography is implicit. Thor put Mjolnir through a fourth suit's midsection and the remaining components scattered decoratively.
Tony lunged at the last one, grabbed its head with both hands, and applied the serum-enhanced strength. The head came off with a sound that added to the general ambiance of the ruined party, and he fell with it and landed hard on the good carpet.
The room was quiet for a moment, and then less quiet because of the structural damage.
The original suit — the assembled one — stood in the center of what remained of the gathering. It looked at the wreckage around it, at the people who were still upright, at the weapons pointed at it.
"Look at this," it said. It sounded almost tired. "All this fuss."
"I'm sorry," Ultron continued. "I know you meant well. All of you — Tony especially. You want to protect the world. You just couldn't see past the tools you were already using." It picked up the torso of one of the destroyed suits, turned the faceplate toward itself, and considered it. "Peace doesn't come from maintaining the current state. Peace comes from change." It dropped the piece. "Change that you've been preventing."
The suit looked around the room one more time.
"There is only one way to actually achieve it. One path that doesn't circle back to the same catastrophe every few years." It took one step toward the window. "Eliminate the superhumans."
It went through the window and into the night.