The Young Avengers' training facility sat two miles outside Cairo proper, a converted airfield hangar retrofitted with sparring rings, a medical bay, and enough monitoring equipment to make FRIDAY's job possible from a dozen angles at once.
Tony's portal dropped him just outside the main entrance, the chaos energy dissipating behind him with a faint hum.
"Boss is here," FRIDAY announced through the hangar's speakers, her voice carrying the same easy warmth she always had. "Should I clear the training floor?"
"Don't bother on my account," Tony said, walking in. "Let them finish."
He found most of the team already mid-session. Peter and Miles were running a coordination drill in the main ring, trading positions faster than most opponents could track, webbing and camouflage weaving together into something that looked less like two separate fighters and more like one system with two bodies.
Riri sat off to the side with a tablet, annotating something on a half-disassembled gauntlet.
Kamala watched the sparring match from the sidelines, occasionally shouting encouragement that made Peter lose focus for exactly long enough to eat a light hit from Miles.
"You're doing the thing again," Kamala called out. "The thing where you get distracted because I said something nice."
"I am not," Peter said, immediately eating another hit.
Tony leaned against the doorway and let himself watch for a moment before announcing himself.
'Good instincts,' he thought, tracking the footwork. 'Reactive, still a little too reliant on webbing for lateral movement. Miles has better spatial awareness right now, but Peter reads intent faster.'
The old comic-book part of him supplied a dozen storylines where this exact dynamic played out, arguments about who was really in charge, who got taken more seriously.
He filed all of it away. This universe wrote its own story, and so far it had been kinder to both of them than the ones he remembered.
"Alright, break it up," Tony said, stepping fully into the hangar. "I need everyone for a few minutes."
The reaction was immediate. Peter straightened up so fast he nearly walked into Miles.
Kamala's face lit up like someone had flipped a switch. Riri set the gauntlet down without looking away from Tony, already reading something in his posture that the others hadn't caught yet.
"You're leaving," Riri said.
"See, this is why I like you," Tony said. "Straight to the point."
The rest of the team filtered in over the next few minutes. Anna arrived last, unhurried, the way she always moved, like nothing on Earth was worth rushing for anymore after what Hydra had already put her through.
X-23 slipped in through a side entrance without anyone noticing until she was already leaning against the wall near the exit, arms crossed, watching.
Cecilia and Hazmat came together, mid-conversation about something medical that cut off the moment they saw Tony's expression. Pietro was there before anyone consciously registered him arriving, which was standard.
"Alright, gather round, this won't take long," Tony said.
He gave them the short version. The distress signal. The missing Avengers. Three days of preparation already spent, thirty-some hours left before departure.
He kept the details tight, the way he always did with information that mattered this much, but he didn't insult them by hiding the shape of it.
"So you're just going," Peter said when he finished. Not a challenge, more like he was trying the sentence out loud to see how it felt.
"That's the plan."
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