Avengers fic - Another Day Like Today - Chapter 3
Title: Another Day Like Today
Fandom(s): Avengers MCU, Doctor Who
Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, The Eleventh Doctor, JARVIS, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton (more to come)
Pairings: None; Steve & Tony friendship (references to Steve/Peggy)
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Canon-appropriate violence, very mild angst in later chapters
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)
Disclaimer: I don't own the canon characters, no intellectual property violation is intended, etc.
Chapters: 3 of 9
Series: Part One of Only Time
Word Count: 1956
Summary: Tony suits up and joins the rest of the team in battle against strange alien foes in Pennsylvania Station.
Beta: cygna_hime -- Thank you! <3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
JARVIS had already integrated the new components into the Mark VII by the time Tony got down to the workshop. Normally he preferred to sand down the rough edges by hand before installing new parts into the armor, but time (and global crises) waited for no man. "Maybe this one won't be a global crisis," Tony speculated. "Maybe Fury just wants an excuse to play with his shiny new superhero team. I know I would."
"Yes, sir," JARVIS responded drily. "One assumes that to be the reason you have not yet been offered a position within the SHIELD command structure."
"You have no sense of fun, JARVIS. How did I ever manage to build an AI with no sense of fun?"
"One of the great technological mysteries of our time, Sir."
Tony rolled his eyes as he clasped the Mark VII's sensor bracelets around his wrists, and then gave the command for the suit to assemble around him. "Did you finish the tests on the material strength of the alloy formulation for the new parts?"
"Parts made using the new gold-titanium alloy formulation slightly outperformed theoretical projections in bench tests, in both compressive and impact strength," JARVIS replied. "However, your models accurately predicted its resistance to torsional stress."
Tony grinned; JARVIS was better at keeping up with Tony's sudden changes of topic than most humans were. "Excellent. Time for some field-testing."
"Do be careful, Sir."
The faceplate of the Iron Man suit snapped shut. "Aren't I always?"
JARVIS's response came through over the speakers inside his helmet. "My database does not contain a dictionary that lists a definition for the word consistent with your usual behavior patterns. Shall I consult Google?" the AI offered. "Or perhaps UrbanDictionary?"
"No sense of fun, but a gift for biting sarcasm," Tony observed, heading for the hatch designed for workshop launches. "How do you manage it?"
"Years of adaptive programming, Sir," JARVIS replied in his ear as Tony engaged the repulsors and took off.
He cleared Stark Tower and maneuvered his way between two of the nearby buildings. "Did Cap manage to contact the others?" he asked.
There was a brief pause before JARVIS responded. "Call records from Captain Rogers's mobile phone show calls successfully placed to Agents Romanov and Barton and Dr. Banner within the past two minutes, Sir."
"Too bad there's no way of getting in touch with Mr. Renaissance Faire - though he's probably busy testifying at his brother's war crimes tribunal, or whatever passes for a justice system up there. Guess we'll just have to pick up the slack, won't we, JARVIS?"
"Indeed, Sir."
Tony decided that it really was much easier getting around New York City when he didn't have to worry about little things like cars and pedestrians. Which was fortunate, in light of the massive torrent of panicked humanity pouring forth from the main bank of entrances to Pennsylvania Station.
Tony's HUD singled out a familiar motorcycle on the sidewalk near the front of the building; it had been knocked over in the pandemonium. A rope dangling from one of Barton's grappling arrows embedded in the wall beside a smashed-in upper level window told Tony that the other Avengers were already inside. He shifted direction with practiced ease, angling toward the window to follow them, when he noticed something else.
At street level, it must have seemed like pure chaos, but hovering on a level with the nearby rooftops, Tony could see the individual figures blur into smooth lines of motion, streaming along paths of least resistance through the sidewalks and streets, flowing around stopped cars and other small obstacles. But half a block away, something larger interrupted the flow of human motion, knotting up the streams and forcing them to divert around it. Tony took it for a sinkhole at first, centered in the middle of the west-bound side of 33rd Street, but a closer look made him reject that possibility; the symmetry and radial cracking in the asphalt suggested an impact crater.
Impact from what? Tony wondered. He aimed his repulsors downward, bringing him closer to the crater. "JARVIS, did that show up in the damage assessment we got from SHIELD this morning?"
"It did not, Sir," JARVIS replied promptly. "Moreover, elevated temperature readings in the immediate area suggest that the crater was formed within the last thirty minutes. Closer inspection could yield a more precise estimate."
"I think it's safe to say that whatever happened here did it about thirty seconds before Cap's phone rang," Tony retorted. "I'm more interested in what it was. Any thoughts?"
The targeting scanner on his HUD highlighted the roughly circular hole in the center of the crater. "There is an opening, approximately 4.2 meters in diameter, which appears to extend below the level of the street. It is not possible to determine its depth from this distance," JARVIS offered.
"Only one way to find out." Heedless of JARVIS's admonitions of caution, he dove for the tunnel.
The passage didn't curve on the way down or vary in width, though it entered the ground at a slight angle. Tony tried to remember how far below ground the terminal's train and subway platforms extended - before he realized that he'd never actually ridden a train or the subway. Right, private jets and a personal driver. How do I forget these things? Before he could ask JARVIS to pull up schematics of the Manhattan railway system, he reached the end of the tunnel.
Tony could only speculate that the thing at the bottom was some sort of vehicle or transport. It had punched through into a lower-level platform, and tipped partway out into the open space beyond the tunnel. It was much longer than it was wide, and listed heavily to one side like a bizarrely futuristic reimagining of the Tower of Pisa, but its precarious angle left enough of a gap for the Iron Man suit to slide between the transport and the crumbling brick of the platform wall.
It was a tight fit for the armor, but Tony figured that these wouldn't be the only scratches in the finish by the time he got back to Stark Tower. He could hear the sounds of combat in progress echoing through the space beyond. "Am I late to the party?" he asked as he managed to squirm free of the tunnel. "I hope you guys saved me some -" He stared at the scene before him. "- giant six-legged lizard men?"
The shock only lasted for a moment. Not meaningfully weirder than the Chitauri, he decided, and let his HUD show him the scene. He could see three of his teammates, plus the time-traveling stranger; Barton had staked out a position on the stairwell, giving him a clear view of the entire platform, and was taking shots as he saw them. Evidence of his handiwork lay on the concrete floor; one of the reptilian creatures lay sprawled and unmoving, with its weapon half covered by its elongated torso and the shaft of an arrow protruding from an eye socket. Natasha was a blur across the battlefield, diving and somersaulting as often as she ran, dodging blasts from the energy weapons wielded by the lizard men. The Doctor had ducked behind a trash can, and was clutching something that looked like an unnecessarily large and unwieldy pen. And Cap was in the thick of it, barking orders as he stepped out from behind cover to throw his shield or draw fire away from Natasha.
Cap glanced up at Tony as he maneuvered around a collapsed section of wall and skimmed low over the platform to join his team. "Nice of you to join us," Cap remarked, reaching up to catch his shield as it ricocheted off a lizard-man gun and flew back toward him.
"Well, it was either this or play Go Fish with Dummy until you guys got back," Tony replied, dodging a shot from the oversized ray gun wielded by the nearest lizard man. "And he cheats." He held out a hand, unleashing a repulsor blast from his palm at the lizard man. The blow knocked the creature off its four feet, but it clung to its weapon with its two highest limbs.
Counting the single casualty that Hawkeye had managed to inflict, there were eight of the reptile people in total. A couple of them stood upright on their rearmost pair of legs, using their thick tails for balance, which gave them four hands to use for holding weapons or, in one case, tending to an injured comrade. The rest assumed a quadrupedal posture, which still gave them two dextrous limbs to aim their guns with. Their snouts were covered by what Tony guessed were breathing masks, and two large, spiny fins sprouted from their backs. Not weirder than the Chitauri, but only just, Tony decided.
He flew a little higher, lining up two simultaneous shots. One knocked the legs out from under the lizard man coming up behind Natasha as she fought another of the creatures, and the other blast knocked away the gun belonging to the lizard man at the edge of the platform, who had been aiming a continued discharge from his weapon at the subway rails, for reasons that Tony didn't have time to care about.
That drew the things' attention. One of them leveled its ray gun at Tony and got off a shot before he could react. He braced himself for any of several possible consequences: being hurled back into the brick wall on the other side of the platform, being electrocuted, having a smoking hole blasted in his armor...
What he didn't expect was for his HUD to go dark, his repulsors to cut out completely, and the armor to drop like a rock onto the concrete. The steady thrumming of his arc reactor was gone, and Tony couldn't tell if his inability to breathe was due to panic, imminent cardiac arrest, or the failure of the suit's internal atmospheric system. He struggled against the suddenly suffocating weight of his own armor, trying to raise his arm enough to lift the faceplate of his helmet. When he managed to pry it up, he had to squeeze his eyes shut against the dazzling torrent of energy pouring into him in a steady stream from the lizard man's weapon.
Then the blinding light and prickling static across his skin stopped, and Tony felt the arc reactor hum to life again in his chest. He lifted his head to find himself lying in the reassuringly large shadow of Captain America. Cap's shield was raised in front of him, reflecting the beam from the lizard creature's gun up into the ceiling. The dim overhead lights flickered and died.
"Iron Man, get out of here!" Cap shouted over his shoulder. "Get upstairs and help Banner with crowd control!"
Tony got a knee under him, and pushed himself to his feet behind Cap. The power display in his HUD read 26% and rising. "I'm fine," he argued. "I'll be back to full power in about a minute."
"This isn't a discussion," Cap growled. "You're out of this fight. Now get up there and make sure the civilians don't trample each other to death on the way out of the building!"
His armored gauntlets curled into fists, but the part of Tony that was still reeling from having the arc reactor shut down knew that all Cap had to do to win this argument was move his shield and step aside. Swallowing an angry retort, Tony engaged his repulsors and shot off toward the staircase, twisting in midair once to dodge a weapon blast and again to avoid colliding with Hawkeye on the steps.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Fandom(s): Avengers MCU, Doctor Who
Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, The Eleventh Doctor, JARVIS, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton (more to come)
Pairings: None; Steve & Tony friendship (references to Steve/Peggy)
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Canon-appropriate violence, very mild angst in later chapters
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)
Disclaimer: I don't own the canon characters, no intellectual property violation is intended, etc.
Chapters: 3 of 9
Series: Part One of Only Time
Word Count: 1956
Summary: Tony suits up and joins the rest of the team in battle against strange alien foes in Pennsylvania Station.
Beta: cygna_hime -- Thank you! <3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
JARVIS had already integrated the new components into the Mark VII by the time Tony got down to the workshop. Normally he preferred to sand down the rough edges by hand before installing new parts into the armor, but time (and global crises) waited for no man. "Maybe this one won't be a global crisis," Tony speculated. "Maybe Fury just wants an excuse to play with his shiny new superhero team. I know I would."
"Yes, sir," JARVIS responded drily. "One assumes that to be the reason you have not yet been offered a position within the SHIELD command structure."
"You have no sense of fun, JARVIS. How did I ever manage to build an AI with no sense of fun?"
"One of the great technological mysteries of our time, Sir."
Tony rolled his eyes as he clasped the Mark VII's sensor bracelets around his wrists, and then gave the command for the suit to assemble around him. "Did you finish the tests on the material strength of the alloy formulation for the new parts?"
"Parts made using the new gold-titanium alloy formulation slightly outperformed theoretical projections in bench tests, in both compressive and impact strength," JARVIS replied. "However, your models accurately predicted its resistance to torsional stress."
Tony grinned; JARVIS was better at keeping up with Tony's sudden changes of topic than most humans were. "Excellent. Time for some field-testing."
"Do be careful, Sir."
The faceplate of the Iron Man suit snapped shut. "Aren't I always?"
JARVIS's response came through over the speakers inside his helmet. "My database does not contain a dictionary that lists a definition for the word consistent with your usual behavior patterns. Shall I consult Google?" the AI offered. "Or perhaps UrbanDictionary?"
"No sense of fun, but a gift for biting sarcasm," Tony observed, heading for the hatch designed for workshop launches. "How do you manage it?"
"Years of adaptive programming, Sir," JARVIS replied in his ear as Tony engaged the repulsors and took off.
He cleared Stark Tower and maneuvered his way between two of the nearby buildings. "Did Cap manage to contact the others?" he asked.
There was a brief pause before JARVIS responded. "Call records from Captain Rogers's mobile phone show calls successfully placed to Agents Romanov and Barton and Dr. Banner within the past two minutes, Sir."
"Too bad there's no way of getting in touch with Mr. Renaissance Faire - though he's probably busy testifying at his brother's war crimes tribunal, or whatever passes for a justice system up there. Guess we'll just have to pick up the slack, won't we, JARVIS?"
"Indeed, Sir."
Tony decided that it really was much easier getting around New York City when he didn't have to worry about little things like cars and pedestrians. Which was fortunate, in light of the massive torrent of panicked humanity pouring forth from the main bank of entrances to Pennsylvania Station.
Tony's HUD singled out a familiar motorcycle on the sidewalk near the front of the building; it had been knocked over in the pandemonium. A rope dangling from one of Barton's grappling arrows embedded in the wall beside a smashed-in upper level window told Tony that the other Avengers were already inside. He shifted direction with practiced ease, angling toward the window to follow them, when he noticed something else.
At street level, it must have seemed like pure chaos, but hovering on a level with the nearby rooftops, Tony could see the individual figures blur into smooth lines of motion, streaming along paths of least resistance through the sidewalks and streets, flowing around stopped cars and other small obstacles. But half a block away, something larger interrupted the flow of human motion, knotting up the streams and forcing them to divert around it. Tony took it for a sinkhole at first, centered in the middle of the west-bound side of 33rd Street, but a closer look made him reject that possibility; the symmetry and radial cracking in the asphalt suggested an impact crater.
Impact from what? Tony wondered. He aimed his repulsors downward, bringing him closer to the crater. "JARVIS, did that show up in the damage assessment we got from SHIELD this morning?"
"It did not, Sir," JARVIS replied promptly. "Moreover, elevated temperature readings in the immediate area suggest that the crater was formed within the last thirty minutes. Closer inspection could yield a more precise estimate."
"I think it's safe to say that whatever happened here did it about thirty seconds before Cap's phone rang," Tony retorted. "I'm more interested in what it was. Any thoughts?"
The targeting scanner on his HUD highlighted the roughly circular hole in the center of the crater. "There is an opening, approximately 4.2 meters in diameter, which appears to extend below the level of the street. It is not possible to determine its depth from this distance," JARVIS offered.
"Only one way to find out." Heedless of JARVIS's admonitions of caution, he dove for the tunnel.
The passage didn't curve on the way down or vary in width, though it entered the ground at a slight angle. Tony tried to remember how far below ground the terminal's train and subway platforms extended - before he realized that he'd never actually ridden a train or the subway. Right, private jets and a personal driver. How do I forget these things? Before he could ask JARVIS to pull up schematics of the Manhattan railway system, he reached the end of the tunnel.
Tony could only speculate that the thing at the bottom was some sort of vehicle or transport. It had punched through into a lower-level platform, and tipped partway out into the open space beyond the tunnel. It was much longer than it was wide, and listed heavily to one side like a bizarrely futuristic reimagining of the Tower of Pisa, but its precarious angle left enough of a gap for the Iron Man suit to slide between the transport and the crumbling brick of the platform wall.
It was a tight fit for the armor, but Tony figured that these wouldn't be the only scratches in the finish by the time he got back to Stark Tower. He could hear the sounds of combat in progress echoing through the space beyond. "Am I late to the party?" he asked as he managed to squirm free of the tunnel. "I hope you guys saved me some -" He stared at the scene before him. "- giant six-legged lizard men?"
The shock only lasted for a moment. Not meaningfully weirder than the Chitauri, he decided, and let his HUD show him the scene. He could see three of his teammates, plus the time-traveling stranger; Barton had staked out a position on the stairwell, giving him a clear view of the entire platform, and was taking shots as he saw them. Evidence of his handiwork lay on the concrete floor; one of the reptilian creatures lay sprawled and unmoving, with its weapon half covered by its elongated torso and the shaft of an arrow protruding from an eye socket. Natasha was a blur across the battlefield, diving and somersaulting as often as she ran, dodging blasts from the energy weapons wielded by the lizard men. The Doctor had ducked behind a trash can, and was clutching something that looked like an unnecessarily large and unwieldy pen. And Cap was in the thick of it, barking orders as he stepped out from behind cover to throw his shield or draw fire away from Natasha.
Cap glanced up at Tony as he maneuvered around a collapsed section of wall and skimmed low over the platform to join his team. "Nice of you to join us," Cap remarked, reaching up to catch his shield as it ricocheted off a lizard-man gun and flew back toward him.
"Well, it was either this or play Go Fish with Dummy until you guys got back," Tony replied, dodging a shot from the oversized ray gun wielded by the nearest lizard man. "And he cheats." He held out a hand, unleashing a repulsor blast from his palm at the lizard man. The blow knocked the creature off its four feet, but it clung to its weapon with its two highest limbs.
Counting the single casualty that Hawkeye had managed to inflict, there were eight of the reptile people in total. A couple of them stood upright on their rearmost pair of legs, using their thick tails for balance, which gave them four hands to use for holding weapons or, in one case, tending to an injured comrade. The rest assumed a quadrupedal posture, which still gave them two dextrous limbs to aim their guns with. Their snouts were covered by what Tony guessed were breathing masks, and two large, spiny fins sprouted from their backs. Not weirder than the Chitauri, but only just, Tony decided.
He flew a little higher, lining up two simultaneous shots. One knocked the legs out from under the lizard man coming up behind Natasha as she fought another of the creatures, and the other blast knocked away the gun belonging to the lizard man at the edge of the platform, who had been aiming a continued discharge from his weapon at the subway rails, for reasons that Tony didn't have time to care about.
That drew the things' attention. One of them leveled its ray gun at Tony and got off a shot before he could react. He braced himself for any of several possible consequences: being hurled back into the brick wall on the other side of the platform, being electrocuted, having a smoking hole blasted in his armor...
What he didn't expect was for his HUD to go dark, his repulsors to cut out completely, and the armor to drop like a rock onto the concrete. The steady thrumming of his arc reactor was gone, and Tony couldn't tell if his inability to breathe was due to panic, imminent cardiac arrest, or the failure of the suit's internal atmospheric system. He struggled against the suddenly suffocating weight of his own armor, trying to raise his arm enough to lift the faceplate of his helmet. When he managed to pry it up, he had to squeeze his eyes shut against the dazzling torrent of energy pouring into him in a steady stream from the lizard man's weapon.
Then the blinding light and prickling static across his skin stopped, and Tony felt the arc reactor hum to life again in his chest. He lifted his head to find himself lying in the reassuringly large shadow of Captain America. Cap's shield was raised in front of him, reflecting the beam from the lizard creature's gun up into the ceiling. The dim overhead lights flickered and died.
"Iron Man, get out of here!" Cap shouted over his shoulder. "Get upstairs and help Banner with crowd control!"
Tony got a knee under him, and pushed himself to his feet behind Cap. The power display in his HUD read 26% and rising. "I'm fine," he argued. "I'll be back to full power in about a minute."
"This isn't a discussion," Cap growled. "You're out of this fight. Now get up there and make sure the civilians don't trample each other to death on the way out of the building!"
His armored gauntlets curled into fists, but the part of Tony that was still reeling from having the arc reactor shut down knew that all Cap had to do to win this argument was move his shield and step aside. Swallowing an angry retort, Tony engaged his repulsors and shot off toward the staircase, twisting in midair once to dodge a weapon blast and again to avoid colliding with Hawkeye on the steps.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8