Before long, the Avengers' pre-battle meeting got underway.

Tony opened with a bombshell, a private island, purchased outright, with a brand-new base already built on it. All future operations would run from there.

In the original timeline, the Thanos from a parallel universe had kicked off the war right where they were currently sitting. Their base sat on the outskirts of New York City, and if war came, the fighting could spill into populated areas without much trouble. So Tony had done what Tony did and simply bought an island. Whatever happened out there, civilian casualties would stay minimal.

"I hate rich people," Clint said, with a succinct nod.

Tony was thoroughly used to it. The comment got brushed past without breaking stride.

"First priority: we still need to collect all six Infinity Stones."

"Everything follows the original plan — Cap, Scott, and I travel to 2012 New York to retrieve the Time, Space, and Mind Stones."

Dr. Banner and the Hulk were fully separated now, which meant there weren't enough Pym Particles for both to make the round trip. Add in the fact that Banner had no way to defend himself and the Hulk was difficult to control, and the math was simple: Tony's group of three would handle it alone.

"Thor and that plush toy head to Asgard for the Reality Stone."

"Call me a plush toy one more time and I swear I'll empty this entire clip into your face." Rocket lunged onto the table, teeth bared. Star-Lord grabbed the scruff of Rocket's neck and hauled him back into the seat, getting bitten for the trouble.

Tony waved the whole thing off. Then the look turned to Natasha and Clint, and something heavier moved across Tony's face.

Clint cut in before Tony could speak. "I'll go to Vormir alone for the Soul Stone. And to check on the goat."

"No."

Natasha's voice came out flat and sharp, cutting Clint off. After years as close friends, Natasha could read every word left unsaid: go alone, and if their plan didn't work, jump without hesitating for a second.

"Promise me, Nat. I don't want to ever see you go off that cliff again." The smile Clint gave was a bitter one.

Ever since watching the movie Peter had brought back, Clint had spent a full week waking up in the middle of the night. The nightmares were identical every time, Natasha with tears at the corners of her eyes, releasing Clint's hand, alone at the bottom of the Vormir cliff with no breath left in her body.

Just watching it had been enough to leave a bruise on the chest. The other version of Clint, the one who had actually been there, had lived with that weight for years.

Clint didn't even want to imagine how much despair that version had carried through the rest of life.

Natasha kept arguing. Clint kept pushing back. Neither was willing to let even the smallest chance of that fall on the other.

"Hold on —" Yelena, who had been half-listening in a fog from the sidelines, went still. Then comprehension hit. Both eyes flew wide and one hand shot out to seize Clint by the collar.

"So Natasha was the one who jumped?!"

When Natasha had been resurrected, the mention of the original timeline had been brief, barely a sentence. Yelena had never heard the full picture, and Natasha had made a point of carefully keeping the fact of her own death in the original timeline hidden.

Now Yelena knew.

The whole conference room watched a two-person argument turn into a three-way one. No one moved to get involved, but the worry on every face was plain, and the silence between the raised voices sat heavy.

Losing any one of them would cost all of them something they couldn't get back.

Yang Luoluo's brow was knotted tight, fingers working at the hem of her clothes without noticing, cycling through every possibility, some way to get the Stone without anyone going over that edge.

Damn that Red Skull. What if they just kicked Red Skull off and let the Stone take what it wanted...

...Red Skull.

An idea surfaced.

She turned it over. The more she examined it, the more solid it felt. Yang Luoluo slapped her thigh before she could stop herself. The sharp sound snapped through the room, and every head turned, even the three-way argument cut off mid-sentence, Natasha, Clint, and Yelena all twisting around to look at her.

"Luoluo, you've got something?" Clint's expression jumped from tense to hopeful. Yelena released Clint's collar and looked over with the same expectation.

All those eyes landing on her at once made Yang Luoluo inch closer to Loki on instinct. "I mean, I just have an idea. I'm not even sure if it'd actually work..."

"Doesn't matter. Say it." Tony had already rolled the chair over, leaning forward with barely-contained interest.

Yang Luoluo cleared her throat.

"So... we have Mantis, Wanda, and Loki. All three of them can influence someone's mind, right? So... what if we made someone — anyone — believe that Red Skull is the person they care about most in the world...?"

Her voice got quieter as she went. She trailed off and, along with everyone else, looked slowly toward Steve.

If there was anyone in the room with the strongest existing feelings toward Red Skull, it was undeniably Captain America.

Steve felt a full-body shudder go through him. Red Skull's face surfaced before it could be stopped, and whatever expression had been there before promptly collapsed into something pained. Both hands came up in a frantic wave, every inch radiating revulsion.

"No. Absolutely not. I would rather throw myself off that cliff than agree to this."

The last person Steve expected to come to the rescue was Tony. Tony rolled back over, gave Steve a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, and politely declined the room's unspoken proposal on Steve's behalf.

"Give Cap a break, the two of us still have three Stones to grab. As for Red Skull..." Tony paused, and let both eyes drift slowly toward Clint.

At that point, Natasha set friendship aside entirely. There was one brief, pitying glance at Clint, and then Natasha was on both feet, pulling Yelena away from that corner of the room with purpose.

"You know, I think you're right, Clint. So I won't be going. Good luck with it."

Given a choice between being made to believe Red Skull was the love of Natasha's life and just jumping off the cliff, the cliff won.

A fist pump. Yelena, standing right there, looked at the blank expression frozen on Clint's face and felt, if anything, a faint twinge of sympathy.

While Clint was still somewhere in the fog of how has this become my problem, the rest of the room had already, with remarkably smooth coordination, moved on.

"Last item. The Power Stone." The lightness dropped off Tony's face.

There was a question that had been sitting at the back of Tony's mind and wouldn't leave: could they actually change anything?

Look at the Battle of Hogwarts. Snape had never gone near the Shrieking Shack, by every reasonable expectation, that should have been enough to sidestep a death baked into the original script. Instead, Snape turned up in the Forbidden Forest and Nagini found a way to sink teeth in regardless. If Yang Luoluo and the others hadn't gotten there when they did, the outcome would have been the same.

Then there was Kate Bishop. According to Yang Luoluo, Kate was supposed to cross paths with Clint because of the whole "Ronin" period and end up as the successor. Clint had never become Ronin. Kate had still found Clint, through Peter and the others, and ahead of schedule on top of it.

Was this all just... fixed? Was every one of these events going to happen no matter what angle they came at it from?

Tony put the question to the room. Before anyone else could get a word in, Star-Lord raised a hand with the eager energy of a student who'd done the reading for once.

"Actually, we went to deal with the High Evolutionary and ended up picking up this golden guy along the way. I kind of wanted to ask..." Star-Lord looked at Yang Luoluo. "Was that also supposed to happen?"

Golden.

Wait. No. It couldn't be.

"This golden guy, the name wouldn't be Adam, would it? Kind of a premature baby situation, a little light on brains?"

Yang Luoluo's voice came out careful.

Star-Lord clapped once. "That's exactly him! So Adam joining the Guardians of the Galaxy was always going to happen too. Case closed."

Tony's working theory just got a lot harder to argue with.

"Looks like I'm probably right." Tony's expression was not a happy one. Steve quietly pushed a glass of water across the table.

"Given that, I think we need two separate teams going after the Power Stone. One team is still Nebula and Rhodes, same as the original. The other team just needs to be anyone who isn't those two."

The reasoning was straightforward: in the original timeline, Nebula's cybernetic modifications meant that the instant she traveled back, the past Nebula's memory systems connected with the present one's. Thanos picked up on the plan, swapped the past Nebula in place of the present one, and had the quantum tunnel opened for the army.

To test whether any of this could actually be changed, Tony and Steve's team would go first and try to stop that world's Loki from slipping away. If that worked, the plot could be rewritten.

If it didn't, the safest move was to keep Nebula and Rhodes on the Power Stone job to prevent new unknowns from piling up, although there was also the option of doing something to her memory circuits beforehand, which might be enough to slip past Thanos.

Tony finished laying it out. The room agreed across the board, except for Loki, whose expression had gone distinctly sour at the part about stopping another version of himself from escaping.

"Alright, everyone." Tony scanned the room and gave a slow, satisfied nod. "Time to move."

➤ Next: Figure Something Out

Chapter 106 - Figure Something Out

Yang Luoluo, Peter Parker, the Maximoff siblings, and the wizards had just been about to rush out of the conference room and head back to their rooms to pack, when Tony Stark mercilessly dropped a bombshell on them.

They were all staying here at the compound. The island was off-limits.

"Why? I mean, we're members of the alliance too — why can't we go?"

Peter Parker's eyes were full of confusion. Peter turned to scan the faces of everyone nearby, and the whole group cooperated perfectly, piling onto Tony Stark all at once.

"Mr. Stark, we can defend ourselves — we're absolutely capable of keeping ourselves safe!"

"You can't expect us to just sit here anxiously while you're all out there fighting!"

"We're all adults, okay, except for Peter, but the rest of us are fully capable of making our own decisions!"

"Hey! I may not be an adult yet, but my combat experience is nothing to scoff at, okay!"

"..."

For a moment, Tony Stark felt like several thousand ducks were quacking nonstop right beside his ears.

"..." Tony took a deep breath, then with lightning speed clamped a hand over Peter Parker's mouth, Peter being the loudest of the bunch, and used his free hand to give Peter a firm flick on the forehead.

"Kid, you still haven't answered for sneaking onto that ship behind my back!"

Tony snapped, and Peter's expression shifted instantly from aggrieved to guilty. Peter let Tony keep a hand over his mouth without a word of protest, not daring to make a sound, just staring up at Tony with wide, dewy eyes, blinking steadily, hoping to melt his heart that way.

Tony was completely unmoved.

One Peter Parker fell. Ten thousand Peter Parkers rose up in his place.

"Mr. Stark, I —"

Yang Luoluo hadn't even finished before Tony cut her off. "And that includes you and the ones who walk around with sticks. This battle is restricted to official Avengers members only. You're not going."

Reserve-member Yang Luoluo was so infuriated by this transparently improvised excuse that her nose nearly twisted sideways. The wizards clamped their mouths shut in indignant silence.

The Maximoff siblings, however, lit up at those words and spoke up at once.

"The two of us are official members — surely we can go now?"

Under their hopeful gazes, Tony thought seriously for a few seconds, then shook his head with finality. He pointed at Pietro Maximoff.

"You, going by physical age, you're a minor."

Pietro deflated.

Tony pointed at Wanda Maximoff.

"You, given that you're in a relationship with Vision, who is barely three years old, I have serious doubts your mental age has reached adulthood either. So you're not going."

Wanda:?

Having successfully bamboozled everyone with that string of twisted logic, Tony planted his hands on his hips with satisfaction. On his way out the door, he tossed one last warning over his shoulder.

"I'll have F.R.I.D.A.Y. keeping an eye on all of you the whole time. I hope I won't be seeing any of your faces on the battlefield. You don't want to find out what the punishment is."

"As you wish, Boss."

Gratified to hear F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s reply, Tony strutted out the door looking very pleased with himself, leaving the group sitting in the conference room with deeply complicated expressions.

A long silence stretched out. Then George broke it out of nowhere.

"I have to say, I never realized Mr. Stark was such a dictator."

Those words seemed to break the seal on everyone else. Peter let out a wail and flopped face-first onto the table. "It's over. F.R.I.D.A.Y. is watching us the whole time, there's no way to sneak after them like last time!"

The Weasley twins heard that and their eyes lit up simultaneously. They crowded in on either side of Peter.

"Mate, so you actually snuck onto the ship before?"

"What was it like up there? Come on, tell us, that's incredible!"

Peter's attention was instantly hijacked by the twins, and Harry, Ron Weasley, and Draco Malfoy couldn't hold back either, all three drifted over to listen to Peter tell the story.

"Ugh. Boys." Hermione Granger let out a helpless sigh.

Pietro didn't go over to join the excitement, not because Pietro wasn't interested, but because having already encountered aliens, alien fleets, and armies of robots, one ordinary spaceship genuinely couldn't stir Pietro's curiosity anymore.

"What do we do now? With F.R.I.D.A.Y. watching, she might report us to Mr. Stark the moment we so much as get near one of the Avengers' jets..."

Pietro sat down dejectedly beside Wanda. Ever since the resurrection, every task handed down had been the kind Pietro could wrap up in two or three moves. Pietro wanted to make a real mark at Endgame too.

That damn purple yam had actually turned his sister to ash. He, the great Quicksilver, was going to make Thanos pay for that.

"Wanda, do you have any ideas?" Pietro looked toward Wanda with hope. Wanda's power was Chaos Magic, Loki himself had personally vouched that it would be devastating once it fully matured. Maybe Wanda could secretly transport the whole group to the island?

Under Pietro's hopeful gaze, Wanda slowly shook her head.

"But..." Before Pietro even had a chance to sigh, Wanda continued, "I think there's someone who might have a way."

"Who?"

The others immediately turned to look at Wanda. Wanda suddenly broke into a bright smile aimed directly at Yang Luoluo. A chill ran straight down Yang Luoluo's back, and an ominous feeling welled up right along with it.

...

Pushed to the door of a room by countless hands at her back, the door seemed to sense her arrival and swung open without a sound.

She turned, the culprits had already sprinted around the corner of the hallway and were now beaming at her with encouraging fists raised.

"You've got this!" Yang Luoluo narrowed her eyes and worked out Peter Parker's lip movements. Before she could even raise a fist at that lot, the person inside had already lost patience.

"Get in here, or I'll personally invite you in."

He put particular stress on the word invite. Yang Luoluo sighed, and under the watchful gazes of her comrades-in-suffering, walked inside.

At the corner.

"Do you think Luoluo will actually pull it off?" George shook his head, not particularly confident in this plan. "The God of Mischief isn't exactly easy to talk around."

Peter thought carefully for a moment. "I don't know why, but I've always had a feeling the odds will be pretty good."

"Don't worry." Wanda clenched her fist with complete confidence. "Anyone else might not succeed, but if it's Luoluo..."

"Just wait for the good news!"

...

Inside the room.

"Loki, I,"

"Don't even think about it."

Loki closed the book in his hands and, without a second word, cut off what Yang Luoluo hadn't even finished saying.

"I haven't told you what it is yet!"

Yang Luoluo was exasperated. Why did every single person love interrupting her mid-sentence?

At that, Loki offered an expression that was almost apologetic, then the next second reverted to a perfectly blank face.

"Isn't it that you want me to take you all to the new base? Forget it. I'm not going to help you with that."

"Absolutely not."

Knocked back again and again, Yang Luoluo dropped straight onto Loki's bed in sullen silence. She said nothing, just glared at him, lips pressed into a tight line. Anyone could see she was angry.

Seeing that, Loki sighed helplessly, and when he spoke again his tone had softened considerably.

"Isn't it better for all of you to stay here in safety? With the information you brought, this battle is already practically won."

Yang Luoluo turned her head away entirely and now wouldn't even look at him.

Loki was starting to get a headache. He genuinely wanted to teleport over to Thor and grab him by the collar to ask how Thor had ever managed to coax his astronomer ex-girlfriend.

"If you really want to watch, I could stream it for you, that's the right word, isn't it? Stream?"

Still no response. She shifted slightly further away.

Loki was completely out of options. He pinched the bridge of his nose and began reasoning with her patiently.

"I truly cannot take you all there. Setting aside the fact that the Avengers might redirect their fire at me before the battle even starts, there's no one there who can guarantee your safety,"

"We can guarantee our own safety."

Yang Luoluo was looking at him now, but when she turned back, Loki couldn't help noticing that the corners of her eyes seemed faintly red.

Surely not. She had actually cried because he wouldn't take her to the battlefield?

The more Loki thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, and his tone softened involuntarily by several more degrees.

In reality, Yang Luoluo was just frustrated, frustrated at being cut off again and again and again. Loki, of course, had not considered that, and was still racking his brain trying to figure out how to make her happy again.

Yang Luoluo knew perfectly well that the lot of them were being unreasonable. Tony had kept them away from the battlefield out of concern for their safety. But if all they could do was sit at the safe compound and worry about their friends,

They couldn't do that.

But Loki refused to budge no matter what. Yang Luoluo wrestled with it inwardly for a long moment, and in the end gritted her teeth and decided to sacrifice her dignity.

She forced her eyes as wide as they would go, reached out, and grabbed Loki's sleeve, shaking it in a pleading gesture.

"Loki, please, just take us,"

HISS!

Loki recoiled. His emotions churned into complete turmoil. He never could have imagined that Yang Luoluo, in her determination to reach the battlefield, could actually bring herself to act coy with him.

"N-no... that's not, no..." Loki was still clinging to his last line of defense, forcing the refusal out.

Yang Luoluo silently ground her teeth and clenched her fist.

Damn it. She'd have to go further.

Loki was still trying to settle his own composure when he felt a sudden coolness against the side of his face. A soft breath swept across his hair.

A cool, gentle kiss landed there.

!

Loki completely lost it.

➤ Next: Sneaking Along