Steve Rogers dreamt of pieces of his life.
That was how his mind kept him sane if the naive boy could ever be considered one. One moment, he was back in Brooklyn before the serum, skinny, cold, and angry at every staircase in America. Next, he was taller, broader, and much, much stronger, and watching the world decide that a good man in a costume was cheaper than a proper super soldier. Then came the stage lights, the costume, the senator, the grinning girls, the cheap applause, and the slow humiliation of realising that Captain America had become a poster boy to sell war bonds before he had become a soldier.
The dream moved again, and Bucky fell.
That part always came back crueller than the rest, with the details of the train, the snow, and the emptiness after his hand grabbed nothing while the man he deemed brother fell to his death. Steve never reached him, always a heartbeat late.
Then the dream lied to him kindly and gave him a ballroom to keep him sane.
Peggy stood waiting on polished wood under warm light, and for one stolen stretch of sleep, the dance finally happened. No countdown on a radio. No crashing aircraft, freezing ocean or a line held open across a dead connection while he steered a weapon into the ice because apparently that had seemed like the only solution at the time.
She stepped closer. He could smell perfume and powder, as well as the room's polished, old-world warmth. Her hand touched his sleeve.
Then the transport hit a bad patch of road,d and the ballroom shuddered into steel.
Steve's eyes opened inside a secure SHIELD medical carrier with straps at his chest, low instrument lights, and two silent agents pretending not to stare at the legend currently waking up like a man dragged sideways through seven decades and not consulted on the route.
He stared at the ceiling for one second longer than necessary and knew before anyone told him that the dance had not happened yet.
-
While the old capsicle was being moved to a secure and theatrical facility under SHIELD custody, Fury was still trying to decide how much trouble one vanished Asgardian war machine, and one very alive Lucius Noctis, could fit into the same month. Shield has over five hundred doses of SP now, waiting to be used in a crisis.
The answer, judging by the footage from Ross's ruined base, was too much.
The twelve flying constructs had hit, levelled everything worth levelling, and then gone straight up into the sky like they had business elsewhere. They had not used the Bifrost. Fury was sure of that much. The Asgardians had arrived and departed with that glowing piece of mythological infrastructure loud enough to irritate every instrument in range. These things had simply flown away.
That kept him on edge.
Still, he had a silver lining, and the silver lining wore a jawline America still wanted to salute.
Steve Rogers was perfect in all the ways that made him useful, die-hard, honest, and painfully willing to swallow a polished lie if patriotism had been buffed onto it hard enough first. Fury no longer especially admired that quality, but admiration had long since ceased to be a requirement for recruitment.
He looked over the Rogers file again while one monitor looped the attack on Ross's base and another tracked the secured transport carrying the man into SHIELD's hands.
Thor had changed the scale of the problem.
That was the lesson Fury had taken from the arrival of the blond alien with a hammer and a god complex. Humanity was not ready. Not by half, and certainly not by anything official enough to trust. Since the New Mexico incident, he had leaned harder on every scientific asset he could reach. The Destroyer was under study. The Tesseract project had been accelerated until it bordered on abuse. Selvig, half dazed by the cube and not yet fully aware how much trouble awaited him, had been folded into the team.
Humanity needed an edge.
That did not mean Fury trusted the enhanced people already walking around the planet. Xavier was too idealistic. Magneto was too honest about his contempt. Noctis was a private catastrophe dressed like a profitable one. Stark did not trust SHIELD as far as he could throw them. Thor was an alien monarch with muscles where his judgment should have gone. Even Rogers, the cleanest of the lot, was still a man whose morality could be cheated if the right flag stood behind it.
So Fury kept doing what he always did when the future frightened him.
He reached for leverage.
The world would call that prudence later. They always did, right up to the point where his sort of prudence created the next disaster, and everyone had to pretend the wreckage had been unforeseeable.
-
Far from Earth, Thor faced Loki at the end of the Bifrost.
The bridge itself had become a weapon by then. Not a duel in a hall, not a family argument in a throne room, but one son trying to stop genocide while the other still clung to pride badly disguised as grievance. The energy running through the Bifrost was already being turned on Jotunheim. If Thor let it continue, an entire world would be cut apart to satisfy his brother's desperation and Odin's failures in one convenient burst of inherited nonsense.
So Thor chose the blunt answer.
Instead of killing Loki when he had the chance, the so-called brother who sent the Destroyer to fry him instead of ending the source of most of his immediate trouble with one clean decision, he turned the hammer on the bridge itself and started breaking the Bifrost, which was short-sighted and entirely on brand. Loki fought him for it with all the wounded fury of a man who still wanted the throne even while the structure under his feet split apart.
When the bridge finally gave, it did not collapse politely. The energy tore loose. The platform broke.
Odin, restored too late to deserve thanks and just in time to preserve the remnants of his household, appeared and caught Thor. He reached for Loki as well.
That should have been the moment for consequences.
Instead, Loki looked at the hand offered to him, looked at the father who had lied to him all his life, looked at the brother he had failed to kill, and chose the coward's version of agency. He let go and fell, not into death or dignity, but down and away into the part of the universe where bitter little traitors eventually found worse patrons.
That path led him to the Other, to the Chitauri, and to the sceptre carrying the Mind Stone. It also led a whole planet one step closer to New York burning for Fury's education.
On Earth, Loki did not waste time once he had the means. He came for the Tesseract, broke into Project PEGASUS, put Barton and Selvig under the sceptre's control, and turned Fury's already frayed plans into a clusterfuck.
That was the point where the Avengers Initiative stopped being an ambitious file and became a working panic response.
Steve Rogers was pulled in for symbols that still had utility. Natasha found Banner because she was good at locating disasters who can track gamma radiation. Coulson, through a mixture of persistence and luck no sane man should ever rely on twice, got Tony Stark in the room. Fury looked at the assembling pieces and decided the next stop ought to be the X-Men.
If the planet was building teams of problems, he had no intention of leaving that one off the board.
--
While the world kept moving towards its next catastrophe, Lucius was in his facility playing with his soldiers.
That was not a figure of speech.
Telepathy, as strong as his, came with many uses, most of them indecent and all of them useful. The best among them was not mind-reading but total domination. Once a human mind was open far enough, he could do more than press a thought or pull a confession. He could restructure fear, loyalty, desire, impulse control, and obedience. He could take a person apart without ever cutting skin and build something more useful from the surviving pieces.
With more than three hundred perfectly available volunteers under his hand, a full scan of Aesir biology in memory, and matter transmutation waiting on his fingertips, the work had become almost meditative.
He hummed as he moved between the restrained men.
One sat upright in a steel chair while Lucius reworked the vascular tolerance through the body and laid the first layer of altered Asgardian pattern into the marrow. Another lay strapped down while muscle density and recovery thresholds were adjusted to survive a later gift. Others waited for sensory expansion, increased resilience, electrical conduction, or changes Lucius had not yet named, because names were for final products and these were still prototypes.
The point was not to make mutants.
Mutants could be rendered ineffective with inhibitors and shut down. There were already too many little devices, powers, and frightened men in the world imagining they had found mutant repellent and could spray civilisation free of complications. Lucius had no intention of building forces vulnerable to that sort of mosquito-repeller thinking.
So he anchored the abilities under altered Aesir blood and broader biological redesign instead, making them harder to classify, harder to suppress, and harder to explain to idiots, which was usually the same thing as harder to stop.
His hobby brigade was coming along beautifully.
That was how he saw them, not an army yet, not quite, but a hobby garden with better posture and firearms training.
He finished adjusting one soldier's stress response, stepped back, and watched the man's eyes settle into their new, obedient calm.
"Yes," Lucius said softly. "That's better. You were wasting far too much personality on freedom."
He moved on to the next chair.
After another hour of useful tampering, he decided he wanted more variety in the gene pool, more X-Gene templates, more options, and more textures of power to feed into future work.
That meant a visit to Brotherhood and their list of merchandise... he meant their top powerhouses.
He set down the instrument in his hand, reached into his pocket, and took out his faithful Nokia with the kind of fondness some people reserved for family heirlooms.
The call went through.
Mystique answered on the second ring.
There was no aggression in the silence on the other end, only caution. She already knew who was calling. More importantly, she already knew he was not somebody to test just to satisfy pride.
Lucius smiled.
"Raven. Put me through the proper channels, would you? I want to meet Magneto."
Her answer came controlled and careful.
"You're asking for a meeting?"
"I'm informing you politely, I could have just popped in, but I'm a civilised being after all." Lucius looked over the restrained soldiers and the half-finished work in the lab. "I'm bringing a batch of Strengthening Potions. That should be enough to convey my good intentions, no?"
Mystique took a moment before replying.
"When?"
"Now."
The silence that followed made Lucius's mouth curve.
"If I wanted to explain myself over the phone, Raven, I would have called Xavier."
That shut the hush down properly.
He could almost hear her revising the conversation in her head, trimming away what to report, what to keep, and how not to make Erik think she had handled any part of this badly.
"At least tell me whether I should frame this as a business matter or a political one."
Lucius gave a soft laugh.
"Frame it as profitable."
That bought him another silence, shorter this time.
"I'll pass the message."
"Do that. And tell Erik I'm coming in goodwill, which is already more than most people get from me."
He ended the call there, before she could subject him to another moment of meaningless silent treatment.
Then he slid the Nokia back into his pocket, looked at his hobby brigade, and felt the evening improving again.
Magneto's power would suit him well.
That should be fun.