Avengers fic - Another Day Like Today - Chapter 9
Title: Another Day Like Today
Fandom(s): Avengers MCU, Doctor Who
Characters: Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Eleventh Doctor, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Happy Hogan
Pairings: None (references to Steve/Peggy)
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None I can think of
Spoilers: Any and all MCU movies through The Avengers (2012) are fair game, as is anything through Series 6 of NuWho (though there isn't much spoilery of the latter)
Chapters: 9 of 9
Series: Part One of Only Time
Word Count: 1807 of 15185
Summary: Steve and the Doctor return to SHIELD Headquarters to report back to Fury and the rest of the team. Tony has a surprise... and so does the Doctor.
Beta: cygna_hime -- Thank you! <3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
"End call," he told JARVIS, and pulled the helmet off his head. He checked his hair in the mirror over the line of sinks, threw a flippant salute at the security camera in the corner of the ceiling, and stepped out of the men's room. The corridor was pale beige, with a steel-gray carpet just padded enough to muffle the footsteps of agents scurrying off to accomplish whatever missions or assignments or errands The Great And Powerful Oz had sent them on.
He followed the route he had seen the others take as Fury had led the way to one of the "tactical observation rooms" - the way people around here avoided using the term war room was amusing, in a charmingly superstitious kind of way. Tony was personally of the opinion that one group attacking another for control of a valued resource fit the textbook definition of "war," but if avoiding the word helped them sleep at night, he couldn't exactly throw stones when it came to dodging self-evident realities for the sake of psychological comfort.
They'd left the door cracked open for him - considerate, since the lock was controlled by a retinal scanner. He palmed it open and strolled inside, offering a slight grin as all eyes turned to him. "Sorry, had to powder my nose," he offered in lieu of an explanation, "what'd I miss?"
"No change yet," Romanov told him, glancing back to the main screen, which displayed a live feed of Stark Tower. He tried to place where the camera was positioned, based on the angle of the shot; it wasn't quite even with the roof, but it couldn't have been more than twenty floors down, and there were no other buildings blocking the bottom of the image. Inside one of the offices across the street, then. And that damned lance of energy was still stabbing straight down into his roof. He tore his eyes away from the monitor to look at Romanov as she continued. "Without any power to the elevators, they'll need to get to the roof on foot, which will take time even for the Captain."
"I know; I've just never been very good at the whole 'waiting' thing, and - hold on!" His gaze snapped back to the screen, and he moved closer to it. The column of light in the image had changed. It seemed wider up toward the top edge of the monitor. He turned to Fury, keeping one eye on the screen. "Have your camera guy angle the shot higher. Something's happening."
Fury stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. He touched a button on the comm panel beside him. "Raise the angle of the image. We need to see farther up." A moment later, the picture on the monitor obediently panned upward. At the extreme edge of the camera's vision, Tony could just see the point where the glowing beam split in two, before disappearing against the bright blue backdrop of the sky.
"They're doing it," he whispered. He was standing beside the monitor now, eyes fixed on the image of the bright strand of light. "Come on, Cap, you can do this." His metal-sheathed hands flexed and opened unconsciously. I should be out there, he thought. Stupid electricity-vampire space dinosaurs.
He realized he'd been holding his breath, and exhaled. The upper corner of the screen held a clock, where hundredths of a second were constantly cycling by, making the set of numbers just to their left seem to tick by at a ploddingly slow rate. The counter cycled through more than a full minute before the glowing thread of light vanished from the screen. "Bring the camera back down!"
Fury was already on the comm with the camera operator, and the image swooped back to the rooftop. At mid-afternoon, few lights would show through the windows of any corporate building, but the A that was all that remained of the Tower's name glowed brightly against the darker platform.
Tony groped blindly behind him for an empty chair, and someone - probably Bruce, he's a real pal like that - kindly slid one under his hand. He sank down into it in relief. "He did it." He felt himself grinning.
"Sir," Romanov cut in, addressing Fury, "the orbital scanners are no longer reading the Ketaros ship. They are picking up what looks like a meteor shower, though none is expected at this time of year."
"A meteor shower?" Barton asked.
She turned to him and nodded. "Yes: a cloud of small fragments of space debris being incinerated by entering the Earth's atmosphere."
"Oh, that kind of meteor shower."
The door opened, and Tony swiveled his chair to see Agent Hill standing just inside the room, looking concerned. "Sir, we've got an internal security alert." Fury turned to glare at Tony.
He raised his hands defensively. "Hey, I did nothing! I went to the can. That's allowed, isn't it?" And I made a phone call, but that shouldn't have set off anyone's oversensitive security systems. Not five minutes later, anyhow.
The Director turned his attention back to Hill. "What are we dealing with, Agent?"
"A door on Level Three were opened without a pass-card or ID scan," she replied. "We've got security en route, but given recent events, I thought it best to keep you informed, sir."
Barton turned to Romanov, pointing down at the table. "Aren't we on Level Three?"
"Excuse me, ma'am," came a familiar voice from behind Hill.
She whirled around, one hand dropping to her sidearm, but relaxed when she saw who was standing there. "Captain Rogers? How did you …? No one picked you up entering the building."
Cap shrugged. "Turns out the Doctor's time machine isn't just a spaceship; it also teleports." He blinked. "That was a weird sentence."
Tony rose and approached them, stepping around Hill to clap a hand on Cap's shoulder. "Try not to think about it too hard," he advised. "If we keep hanging around with this crew, things are only gonna get weirder."
"The security breach was you?" Hill interrupted. "The door seal that was circumvented-"
"We, ah, sort of parked the TARDIS in a utility closet," the Doctor confessed, squeezing past Cap into the room. "I hope we didn't cause too much of a fuss."
Hill rolled her eyes and raised a hand to the headset at her ear. "Security team stand down. The intruders have been identified and," she sighed, "contained."
"Director," the intercom at Fury's elbow blurted, "there's a man at the front gate who says his name is Mr. Hogan, and is insisting to be admitted to see Mr. Stark."
Tony leaned over Fury's shoulder just as he pressed the intercom button to respond. "Yeah, that's Happy - send him right on up; I asked him to bring something for me."
Fury glowered at him, and sighed into the intercom. "Go ahead, let him in and have him escorted to Tactical Observation Four." He twisted his chair around and leveled his glare at Agent Hill. "What the hell is this - did somebody announce SHIELD Headquarters Open House Day and not tell me about it?"
The corner of Hill's mouth twitched. "Not that I'm aware of, sir."
It wasn't long before Happy joined the group assembled in the war room, carrying a small cardboard box and trailing an agent wearing a suit and an earpiece. Completely undaunted by the important-looking and dangerous people surrounding him, Happy strode right up to Tony and offered him the box. "Here you are, Mr. Stark."
Tony grinned at him. "Thanks, Happy." He flipped open the lid, looking down into the box with an uncomfortable mix of emotions that he didn't want to examine too closely. Then he approached the Doctor, who was apparently explaining something to Fury and the agents that involved a lot of wild gesturing.
"Hey, Doc," he interrupted, "I've got something for you."
The Doctor turned to face him, his expression curious. "And what might that be?"
"Well - bearing in mind that I still want to see that time machine of yours before you go disappearing with it," Tony insisted, "I remembered you mentioned that it was running low on power, and while I don't know if the systems will be compatible, or even if this is anything like the kind of power your time-machine-spaceship-teleporter runs on, because seriously, scientists on Earth can't make up their minds about whether time travel is even a thing, let alone how to power it - I thought maybe you might be able to use this as kind of a jump-start, until you could get somewhere that had the right sort of fuel." He thrust the box into the Doctor's hands. "It's one of my old palladium reactors; doesn't do me much good anymore - I learned that lesson the hard way, let me tell you," he patted the triangle of light on his armored chest meaningfully, "but maybe you can get some use out of it. Or not - I mean, if you don't think it'll help, I can always just-"
The Doctor reached into the box and pulled out the tiny arc reactor. Setting the box on the table, he turned the device over in his hands a few times, then looked up at Tony and smiled. "I think this will do just swimmingly to keep the TARDIS going until I can recharge her energy reserves. Thank you."
"Great! So..." Tony tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice, but really, who was he kidding? Time machine. "Do I get to see it?"
"Absolutely! You can even help me adapt your device to the TARDIS's power matrix. Come on, no time like the present," the Doctor replied, heading for the door. He grabbed Cap's arm on the way, dragging him with them into the corridor. "That reminds me, Captain, I wanted to ask you something."
"Yes, Doctor?"
"I think your friend here will be thrilled to bits at the opportunity to poke around the TARDIS's systems with me, but I was thinking you might prefer something else." He paused in the hallway and looked up at Cap. "Would you like to go for a trip? Anywhere in time and space - what do you say?"
The expression that broke across Steve's face was one that Tony had never seen the soldier wear, and it took him a moment to identify: it was joy. "I - yes! I'd like that. Thank you!"
A knowing smirk curled the Doctor's mouth. "I take it you already know where you'd like to go?"
Steve nodded. "I promised a lady a dance," he said simply, his smile making him look much younger and less careworn than the Captain America that Tony had come to know. "I don't want to keep her waiting."
Fandom(s): Avengers MCU, Doctor Who
Characters: Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Eleventh Doctor, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Happy Hogan
Pairings: None (references to Steve/Peggy)
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None I can think of
Spoilers: Any and all MCU movies through The Avengers (2012) are fair game, as is anything through Series 6 of NuWho (though there isn't much spoilery of the latter)
Chapters: 9 of 9
Series: Part One of Only Time
Word Count: 1807 of 15185
Summary: Steve and the Doctor return to SHIELD Headquarters to report back to Fury and the rest of the team. Tony has a surprise... and so does the Doctor.
Beta: cygna_hime -- Thank you! <3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
"End call," he told JARVIS, and pulled the helmet off his head. He checked his hair in the mirror over the line of sinks, threw a flippant salute at the security camera in the corner of the ceiling, and stepped out of the men's room. The corridor was pale beige, with a steel-gray carpet just padded enough to muffle the footsteps of agents scurrying off to accomplish whatever missions or assignments or errands The Great And Powerful Oz had sent them on.
He followed the route he had seen the others take as Fury had led the way to one of the "tactical observation rooms" - the way people around here avoided using the term war room was amusing, in a charmingly superstitious kind of way. Tony was personally of the opinion that one group attacking another for control of a valued resource fit the textbook definition of "war," but if avoiding the word helped them sleep at night, he couldn't exactly throw stones when it came to dodging self-evident realities for the sake of psychological comfort.
They'd left the door cracked open for him - considerate, since the lock was controlled by a retinal scanner. He palmed it open and strolled inside, offering a slight grin as all eyes turned to him. "Sorry, had to powder my nose," he offered in lieu of an explanation, "what'd I miss?"
"No change yet," Romanov told him, glancing back to the main screen, which displayed a live feed of Stark Tower. He tried to place where the camera was positioned, based on the angle of the shot; it wasn't quite even with the roof, but it couldn't have been more than twenty floors down, and there were no other buildings blocking the bottom of the image. Inside one of the offices across the street, then. And that damned lance of energy was still stabbing straight down into his roof. He tore his eyes away from the monitor to look at Romanov as she continued. "Without any power to the elevators, they'll need to get to the roof on foot, which will take time even for the Captain."
"I know; I've just never been very good at the whole 'waiting' thing, and - hold on!" His gaze snapped back to the screen, and he moved closer to it. The column of light in the image had changed. It seemed wider up toward the top edge of the monitor. He turned to Fury, keeping one eye on the screen. "Have your camera guy angle the shot higher. Something's happening."
Fury stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. He touched a button on the comm panel beside him. "Raise the angle of the image. We need to see farther up." A moment later, the picture on the monitor obediently panned upward. At the extreme edge of the camera's vision, Tony could just see the point where the glowing beam split in two, before disappearing against the bright blue backdrop of the sky.
"They're doing it," he whispered. He was standing beside the monitor now, eyes fixed on the image of the bright strand of light. "Come on, Cap, you can do this." His metal-sheathed hands flexed and opened unconsciously. I should be out there, he thought. Stupid electricity-vampire space dinosaurs.
He realized he'd been holding his breath, and exhaled. The upper corner of the screen held a clock, where hundredths of a second were constantly cycling by, making the set of numbers just to their left seem to tick by at a ploddingly slow rate. The counter cycled through more than a full minute before the glowing thread of light vanished from the screen. "Bring the camera back down!"
Fury was already on the comm with the camera operator, and the image swooped back to the rooftop. At mid-afternoon, few lights would show through the windows of any corporate building, but the A that was all that remained of the Tower's name glowed brightly against the darker platform.
Tony groped blindly behind him for an empty chair, and someone - probably Bruce, he's a real pal like that - kindly slid one under his hand. He sank down into it in relief. "He did it." He felt himself grinning.
"Sir," Romanov cut in, addressing Fury, "the orbital scanners are no longer reading the Ketaros ship. They are picking up what looks like a meteor shower, though none is expected at this time of year."
"A meteor shower?" Barton asked.
She turned to him and nodded. "Yes: a cloud of small fragments of space debris being incinerated by entering the Earth's atmosphere."
"Oh, that kind of meteor shower."
The door opened, and Tony swiveled his chair to see Agent Hill standing just inside the room, looking concerned. "Sir, we've got an internal security alert." Fury turned to glare at Tony.
He raised his hands defensively. "Hey, I did nothing! I went to the can. That's allowed, isn't it?" And I made a phone call, but that shouldn't have set off anyone's oversensitive security systems. Not five minutes later, anyhow.
The Director turned his attention back to Hill. "What are we dealing with, Agent?"
"A door on Level Three were opened without a pass-card or ID scan," she replied. "We've got security en route, but given recent events, I thought it best to keep you informed, sir."
Barton turned to Romanov, pointing down at the table. "Aren't we on Level Three?"
"Excuse me, ma'am," came a familiar voice from behind Hill.
She whirled around, one hand dropping to her sidearm, but relaxed when she saw who was standing there. "Captain Rogers? How did you …? No one picked you up entering the building."
Cap shrugged. "Turns out the Doctor's time machine isn't just a spaceship; it also teleports." He blinked. "That was a weird sentence."
Tony rose and approached them, stepping around Hill to clap a hand on Cap's shoulder. "Try not to think about it too hard," he advised. "If we keep hanging around with this crew, things are only gonna get weirder."
"The security breach was you?" Hill interrupted. "The door seal that was circumvented-"
"We, ah, sort of parked the TARDIS in a utility closet," the Doctor confessed, squeezing past Cap into the room. "I hope we didn't cause too much of a fuss."
Hill rolled her eyes and raised a hand to the headset at her ear. "Security team stand down. The intruders have been identified and," she sighed, "contained."
"Director," the intercom at Fury's elbow blurted, "there's a man at the front gate who says his name is Mr. Hogan, and is insisting to be admitted to see Mr. Stark."
Tony leaned over Fury's shoulder just as he pressed the intercom button to respond. "Yeah, that's Happy - send him right on up; I asked him to bring something for me."
Fury glowered at him, and sighed into the intercom. "Go ahead, let him in and have him escorted to Tactical Observation Four." He twisted his chair around and leveled his glare at Agent Hill. "What the hell is this - did somebody announce SHIELD Headquarters Open House Day and not tell me about it?"
The corner of Hill's mouth twitched. "Not that I'm aware of, sir."
It wasn't long before Happy joined the group assembled in the war room, carrying a small cardboard box and trailing an agent wearing a suit and an earpiece. Completely undaunted by the important-looking and dangerous people surrounding him, Happy strode right up to Tony and offered him the box. "Here you are, Mr. Stark."
Tony grinned at him. "Thanks, Happy." He flipped open the lid, looking down into the box with an uncomfortable mix of emotions that he didn't want to examine too closely. Then he approached the Doctor, who was apparently explaining something to Fury and the agents that involved a lot of wild gesturing.
"Hey, Doc," he interrupted, "I've got something for you."
The Doctor turned to face him, his expression curious. "And what might that be?"
"Well - bearing in mind that I still want to see that time machine of yours before you go disappearing with it," Tony insisted, "I remembered you mentioned that it was running low on power, and while I don't know if the systems will be compatible, or even if this is anything like the kind of power your time-machine-spaceship-teleporter runs on, because seriously, scientists on Earth can't make up their minds about whether time travel is even a thing, let alone how to power it - I thought maybe you might be able to use this as kind of a jump-start, until you could get somewhere that had the right sort of fuel." He thrust the box into the Doctor's hands. "It's one of my old palladium reactors; doesn't do me much good anymore - I learned that lesson the hard way, let me tell you," he patted the triangle of light on his armored chest meaningfully, "but maybe you can get some use out of it. Or not - I mean, if you don't think it'll help, I can always just-"
The Doctor reached into the box and pulled out the tiny arc reactor. Setting the box on the table, he turned the device over in his hands a few times, then looked up at Tony and smiled. "I think this will do just swimmingly to keep the TARDIS going until I can recharge her energy reserves. Thank you."
"Great! So..." Tony tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice, but really, who was he kidding? Time machine. "Do I get to see it?"
"Absolutely! You can even help me adapt your device to the TARDIS's power matrix. Come on, no time like the present," the Doctor replied, heading for the door. He grabbed Cap's arm on the way, dragging him with them into the corridor. "That reminds me, Captain, I wanted to ask you something."
"Yes, Doctor?"
"I think your friend here will be thrilled to bits at the opportunity to poke around the TARDIS's systems with me, but I was thinking you might prefer something else." He paused in the hallway and looked up at Cap. "Would you like to go for a trip? Anywhere in time and space - what do you say?"
The expression that broke across Steve's face was one that Tony had never seen the soldier wear, and it took him a moment to identify: it was joy. "I - yes! I'd like that. Thank you!"
A knowing smirk curled the Doctor's mouth. "I take it you already know where you'd like to go?"
Steve nodded. "I promised a lady a dance," he said simply, his smile making him look much younger and less careworn than the Captain America that Tony had come to know. "I don't want to keep her waiting."