Steve's throat moved. He held the phone for one more second, looking at the name on the screen.
Then he let out a long, slow breath.
"It's alright now, Your Majesty. Everything is alright."
"Really?" T'Challa's voice was puzzled, and then warmly, genuinely surprised: "That is wonderful news."
"THEY'RE BACK!!"
Rocket Raccoon's yelp from somewhere in the back of the room broke something open — and the Avengers facility, which had spent twenty days running on tension and cold coffee and the kind of silence that accumulates around grief, came apart all at once.
Jordan opened his arms on reflex.
Natasha walked into them — no hesitation, no irony — and held on for a moment that was brief enough to preserve her dignity and long enough to mean something.
"Thank you," she said, quiet, the emotional control in her voice doing about half the work of containing what was under it.
"You're welcome."
He held up his right hand — showing the Gauntlet, which still sat on his fingers, all six Stones seated — turned it once so the room could see it, then pulled it off and set it on the worktable at the front of the conference table. The same surface it had been assembled on, forty minutes ago.
He left it there.
Around the room, several people who had been watching carefully let out breaths they'd been holding. There was, Jordan noted, a certain quiet but pervasive relief at seeing the Gauntlet placed down by someone who had just used it, rather than kept.
Understandable. An Infinity Gauntlet in the wrong hands was the kind of thing that created preventable apocalypses. Nick Fury wasn't at this facility — and it was probably for the best, Jordan reflected, because Fury's particular brand of strategic paranoia would have generated at minimum twenty contingency plans for dealing with Jordan and the Gauntlet before the snap had finished echoing. The man could not help himself.
Not that it mattered. The Stones were going back where they belonged. A missing Infinity Stone cascaded into timeline disruption and worse — and Jordan had no interest in being the cause of that kind of destruction in a universe he'd spent the last several weeks trying to help.
The Gauntlet sat on the table. The Stones glowed quietly.
Jordan moved away from it.
Within minutes, every hero in the facility was on the phone simultaneously. The conference room went from silent to something resembling a crowded marketplace in the space of one minute — everyone talking at once, names being said and said again, voices cracking on the third syllable of sentences nobody had thought they'd get to finish.
Tony looked at Friday and said: champagne. And food. Real food, not field rations.
FRIDAY delivered both with the efficiency of an AI who had been waiting for an occasion worth deploying her full catering authority.
Tony and Rhodes took the party's energy and ran with it. The atmosphere inside the facility climbed to something that was part relief and part pure, undignified joy, and for a while nobody made any effort to moderate either.
The sliding door crashed open.
Scott Lang, slightly out of breath, having run back from the parking lot where he'd been on simultaneous calls with his girlfriend and her father, pointed at the sky outside.
"Hey — there is a woman out there. Blonde, very fitted suit, came down from literally the sky. She says she's looking for Nick Fury."
He looked around at the faces watching him.
"She landed in this really intense light — she looked like someone you'd rather not pick a fight with." He paused for the comparison that had come to mind. "She looked like—" his finger swung sideways, "—him."
Every face in the room turned.
Jordan, at this moment, was working through a plate of international-standard party food at a pace that left light afterimages around his hands. Pick up. Into the mouth. Small sip of champagne to pace it. Pick up again. The movements were so fast they created a mild visual disturbance in the air around the plate, yet every single motion was completely composed — the unhurried elegance of a man who has been eating meals at this speed since his second month in this body.
He noticed the attention.
"Why is everyone looking at me?" He indicated the table. "There's food."
The heroes looked at the table. Then back at him. Then at each other.
...
The party's momentum paused. Steve and Natasha both thought of the same thing at the same time.
They stepped outside.
Captain Marvel was standing in the courtyard — Carol Danvers, golden aura fading to nothing as she touched down, the Photon suit exactly as the pager's signal had implied it would be. She took in the facility, the people, the absence of catastrophe, and her eyebrows went up.
"Carol." Natasha met her and gave the short version — the snap, the Time Heist, the reversal, Jordan, this morning. "The crisis has been fully resolved. If you have questions after that, Nick Fury can fill in whatever I missed."
Carol's surprise was genuine for exactly one second.
Then she shrugged.
"Good. I'm glad the problem's handled." She glanced at the sky she'd just come from. "I've been burning hard for three weeks to get here. You should know — there are a lot of planets out there in situations like Earth's, and some of them don't have anyone to call."
Steve and Natasha exchanged a look.
There was a polite, considered silence.
Neither of them could find a clean rebuttal.
Steve opened his mouth to invite her inside — he was, constitutionally, a man who extended hospitality before he processed whether to — when the sky above the facility changed.
Three circular portals opened in the air at once. They crackled with golden electric sparks, the specific visual signature of a particular kind of dimensional engineering, and the things they deposited on the landing pad outside made the courtyard crowd spontaneously empty as half the facility came outside to look.
Through the first portal, in a red cloak: Stephen Strange, expression unreadably calm.
Behind him, blinking at the sunlight, moving with the particular energy of someone who is seventeen and has recently experienced something philosophically challenging: Peter Parker, Iron Spider suit half-retracted, face full of collagen and confusion.
Behind them, looking around at Earth's sky with the curious attentiveness of people who know what other skies look like: the Guardians of the Galaxy.
"Hey — Strange! Peter!"
Tony Stark was outside in three strides.
Peter's face did what Peter Parker's face did — it lit up completely, instantly, and he almost ran.
"I thought I was never going to — and Aunt May, and Ned, and MJ, and I can't believe I'm alive, I don't understand what happened, you guys saved the world again somehow, didn't you, this is — wow —"
Tony caught him mid-sentence, pulled him in, and held on.
Peter stopped talking.
The hug lasted about four seconds before Tony pulled back enough to breathe, and when he did, his voice had the quality of someone who has been holding a specific sentence in his chest for weeks.
"I'm sorry. I thought I'd lost you forever, kid."
Peter blinked. Then reached up and patted Tony firmly on the back — the specific gesture of a seventeen-year-old reassuring an adult, which had its own category of weight.
"No, Mr. Stark." He shook his head. "You did it. You saved me."
"We did—"
"You did it."
Tony didn't argue.
From three feet away, Rocket Raccoon launched himself off a railing.
"Quill! Mantis! You're both—I knew it—"
Star-Lord caught him with one arm, wore the smug expression of a man who has decided the universe has acknowledged his importance, and said, "Hey, hey, easy — I appreciate the energy, buddy, but let's keep it cool—"
"Why does no one mention me?" Drax appeared beside Rocket with the particular expression of someone who has reached a genuinely curious conclusion. He looked at Rocket. "Is it because we're not close enough?"
In the middle of all of it, Doctor Strange had not embraced anyone.
He had been watching the reunion — calmly, with the expression of a man who is genuinely glad for the people around him and simultaneously carrying something that hasn't resolved yet. He stood at the edge of it, patient, until Tony had finished with Peter and turned.
"Stark."
Strange's voice cut through the noise without raising. Tony looked over.
Strange walked toward him with the specific economy of movement that meant whatever he was about to say had been sitting in him for longer than this conversation.
"I'm afraid I'll have to borrow a few minutes of your time."