Natasha stifled a yawn as she zipped her overnight bag closed, gncing around her quarters to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. It wasn’t going to be a long trip to DC—just a night or two—but she knew from experience how quickly minor inconveniences could turn into major headaches if she wasn’t properly prepared. A quick check of her phone showed she had a few more minutes before Rhodey would be expecting her downstairs.

  As if on cue, burning red sparks knitted together into a portal and Nat smiled slightly to herself. Wanda stepped through, a hesitant smile on her face, her shoulders slightly hunched. It was pretty obvious from her posture and expression that she felt bad about what had happened.

  “Hey,” Nat greeted her, eyeing the small Tupperware container her girlfriend was holding with both hands.

  Wanda held it out toward her. “Hey! Gingernuts. Baked with hate. Hopefully hate tastes as good as love.”

  A small smile tweaked at the corner of Nat’s mouth. “Oh? How does one bake cookies with hate, exactly?” she asked rhetorically, accepting the offered container and popping the lid to take a quick whiff. They smelled sweet and spicy, and the container was a little warm to the touch—Wanda must have gotten up early to make them and put them in before they’d finished cooling completely.

  “They’re biscuits, not cookies,” Wanda corrected her. “And I stared angrily at each of the ingredients while I got them ready, to ensure an even coating, then swore at the oven for fifteen minutes while they baked.”

  Nat ughed—maybe a little deliriously, from the slight crease of Wanda’s forehead. “We can give some to Ross, if you’d like? Drop them off at his office?” she joked. “Make sure he gets the message?”

  Wanda initially looked like she was going to protest, then a considering look fshed across her face. “You know, that would actually be really funny. But no. Only people I like get to eat my biscuits, even the hate-filled ones.”

  Nat chuckled softly, slipping the container into her bag. Wanda fell into step beside her as they left her quarters, heading downstairs to meet Rhodey before the three of them started to make their way over to the Quinjet hangar.

  “I’m sorry,” Wanda said, gncing between the two of them. “I know this is a massive pain in the ass.”

  “We’ll manage,” Nat said with a small smile. “You just keep out of trouble for now, okay? Might be better to not have any public appearances while we sort this.”

  Less than a minute after Wanda had portalled abruptly out of their meeting with Secretary Ross yesterday, Maria had come up the stairs to the common area, escorting a US Marshal with a subpoena commanding Wanda to appear before the Special Joint Committee on Enhanced Security and Oversight in three days’ time. The timing was obviously suspect, and a quick review of security footage showed that the marshal had been parked just down the road from the compound a good half an hour before their meeting with Ross had been scheduled to start. It looked like Ross’s strategy had been to pin Wanda down with the meeting so she could be served—obviously, he hadn’t quite taken into account how quickly things would go off the rails or how abruptly she’d leave.

  In Wanda’s absence, the Marshal had attempted substituted service by handing the subpoena to Natasha, which had initially been a little surprising. Without a court order permitting it, the service wasn’t legally valid—congressional subpoenas generally required personal delivery to the named individual. Even so, ‘someone’ (read: Ross) had leaked to the press that Wanda had been subpoenaed to appear before the committee and it had been reported on that same afternoon. It was all pre-pnned, of course, all a strategy. The leak put public pressure on Wanda to appear and, even if the subpoena was invalid, if they just ignored it, the government might try to charge her with contempt of Congress anyway and argue that Wanda was being deliberately evasive… which, to be fair, she was.

  Three days wasn’t a lot of time, so Nat and Rhodey had been up all night with Maria and the wyers, working out what their next move was. When it came down to it, Wanda wasn’t a US citizen and had no current immigration status. Without being able to pin her down and serve her, Congress didn’t really have a legal way to compel her to appear, but if she acknowledged the subpoena or responded in any way, that could still be considered constructive service, even if it wasn’t properly served in the first pce. So, if Ross and the Committee wanted to py dodgy legal games, the only real way forward without folding was to py dodgy legal games right back.

  At this stage, the pn was for the Avengers to file a motion to quash the subpoena as a third party asserting standing, and to seek an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order while the court considered the matter. There were a bunch of hurdles there, but Federal judges were, generally speaking, not particurly impressed with improperly-served Congressional subpoenas, so their hope was that—even though it was a legally tenuous move—it would be just viable enough to pass muster, given the circumstances. There was also a potential jurisdictional fight looming if the government tried to argue that Wanda was beyond US judicial reach.

  It would align the Avengers with Wanda more, which wasn’t ideal, but it avoided Wanda acknowledging the subpoena and implicitly allowing that the US had jurisdiction over her. No one thought that Wanda appearing before the committee was a good idea. She just didn’t have the patience to deal with something like that and Nat didn’t bme her—Natasha was well-used to having to testify at these sorts of drawn-out hearings by now, and it was often just hours and hours of carefully picking your words and repeating yourself over and over and over again, until you started to resent the sound of your own voice. Nat loved Wanda very much, but, if her blow-up with Ross was any indication, she would not cope with that well.

  If the temporary restraining order was granted, the Avengers had the resources to drag things out essentially indefinitely if they needed to, given the number of potential avenues of attack—that the surprise, improperly-served subpoena was intended as a political attack, that it risked damaging the Avengers’ and US’s retionship with a strategic ally, that any testimony could jeopardise national (or global) security, that Wanda was being unfairly targeted as a non-citizen Enhanced, and so on. Each point on its own wouldn’t stop the subpoena completely, but the weight of everything taken together had a good chance of grinding the whole thing to a complete halt. They’d need to manage the media side of things carefully, but it was a workable solution.

  They had fallback pns as well. If the Avengers’ third party motion wasn’t granted by the court, their next best bet would be for Wanda to acknowledge the subpoena and get her own, independent legal representation to challenge it directly—while it meant they’d lose out on the argument that the subpoena had been served improperly, Wanda herself would have stronger standing to challenge it, it was cleaner procedurally, and it would be harder for the court to dismiss out of hand. Wanda had already reached out to Nelson and Murdock, who had agreed to file a motion for admission to represent her pro hac vice should that be necessary.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t be, but it was always good to have pns B, C and D in the pocket if you needed them. In the interim, Nat and Rhodey were going to head out to DC to hook up with their local contacts and smooth a few things over.

  Rhodey still looked frustrated, but then again, Rhodey looked frustrated most of the time when he was talking to Wanda. “Even if we can head this off, it won’t be the end of things,” he warned Wanda as they walked. “When it comes down to it, the government just isn’t going to accept the current situation—they’re going to need some kind of concrete assurances, or at least the appearance of them. A framework to manage the way you operate.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but neither was Wanda. This whole situation was a bit of a mess, but Wanda had a lot of reasons for not wanting to accept US oversight. Nat’s personal opinion was that there were inherently irreconcible issues here: problems that just didn’t have any workable solutions that both sides would accept. Their best course of action would be just to bog things down in legal challenges—drag them out for a couple of years, at least—until Wanda was satisfied that the threats she was anticipating had been dealt with and she could step back a bit from working directly with the Avengers.

  “Not interested, sorry,” Wanda said with a shrug. “The US Government is just going to have to trust that I’m a genuinely kind and caring person who is trying to do the best I can. Ask anyone who knows me, they—”

  “Like Shuri?” Rhodey interjected mildly.

  Wanda cleared her throat awkwardly. “Not the Wakandans. I was maybe not the best at managing that entire situation. But still, you can ask like… ninety per cent of the people I’ve ever met. Probably.”

  “It’d help your case a lot if you could come to the table with Secretary Ross again,” he said. “Be nicer this time. Show that you’re willing to work with the government, rather than just cause problems. Be the bigger person.”

  “Be the bigger person?” Wanda scoffed. “Absolutely not. I’m cursing his entire bloodline.”

  The corners of Nat’s mouth twitched as she tried not to ugh, but Rhodey didn’t look particurly impressed. They stopped as they reached the front of the hangar, lingering for a moment as they talked.

  Wanda’s expression dimmed slightly. “Look, Rhodey,” she said, her tone soft. “I really do appreciate everything you’re doing for me. I know that Ross has put you in a difficult, shitty position here and I’m grateful that you’re still going in to bat for me, even though I’m making your job harder. Don’t do anything that risks your career, okay? Worst comes to absolute worst, I’ll just go and testify to the committee.”

  “You absolutely will not,” he said with a sharp shake of his head. “I’m not sure how much of the Capitol will be left standing if you do.”

  “Oh, come on! I’m not going to level the freaking Capitol building. Do you really think I’m that crazy?”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” Rhodey retorted ftly, though his mouth tweaked slightly in a small, tired-looking smile. “I think you're an idiot.”

  Wanda’s eyes glimmered with amusement. “Hey, what I ck in brains I make up for in personality.”

  “Who told you that?” Natasha asked lightly, grinning impishly.

  Wanda’s eyes widened in mock offence and she made an indignant noise in the back of her throat. “Hey! Whose side are you on?”

  Nat leaned in and pecked her on the lips. “Gee, I dunno. I wonder who I’m trekking out to DC to defend?”

  The kiss put a small smile on Wanda’s face. “You’re sure you don’t want me to just portal you guys to Washington?” she asked, gesturing as if conjuring one of her gateways. “It’d be easier.”

  “It’s only a short flight. Convenience aside, the optics of you chauffeuring us around undermines the separation between you and the Avengers we’re leaning on, here.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Wanda groused.

  “It’s only for a couple of days, probably,” Nat said, lightly taking hold of Wanda’s hand and pying with her fingers for a moment. “You can come visit me in the hotel room tonight—I’ll text you, let you know when it’s safe to portal in. We just need to be a little sneaky.”

  There was the faint sound of a phone vibrating and Wanda straightened. Extricating her hand from Natasha, she fished her smartphone out of her pocket and frowned at the screen. “Huh, that’s weird.” Turning the phone, she showed Nat the screen and looked at her questioningly.

  Nat read the name on the screen—Tony Stank—and smiled. “Not that weird, actually. It’s called a ‘phone call’. Sometimes people use these devices to talk to their friends rather than just send text messages, you see.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call Tony and I friends,” Wanda said, making a bit of a face. “We’re more like acquaintances. Or people who work with other people that they hate.”

  Nat sighed. “Please don’t fight with Tony while I’m gone.”

  Wanda paused, gauging Natasha’s expression, then nodded. “Sorry. I’ll do my best. You go do your thing and have a good trip. Love you!” she leaned in and gave Nat another peck on the lips. “Bye!” Taking a deep breath, she put the phone to her ear as she stepped away. “Yo, T-Dawg, what’s up?”

  There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line—Nat was pretty sure no one had ever called Tony that before in his life—before Nat heard a muffled response.

  While Wanda wandered away, Rhodey looked over at Natasha. “Ready to go?”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Rhodey said quietly as the two of them headed inside the building.

  “It’ll be fine, we’ve weathered worse.”

  “Yeah. It’s just that your girlfriend can be very… Wanda.”

  Natasha shot him a dubious sideways gnce. “And your best friend’s extremely Tony. What’s your point?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I just… she didn’t mean it literally before, when she said she was cursing Ross’s bloodline,” Rhodey started hesitantly. “That was just her making another of her dumb references, right?”

  “Honestly? I have no idea. I don’t think she was serious, but even I don’t understand half the references she makes. I’m pretty sure that sometimes she references things that don’t actually even exist yet.”

  Rhodey sighed. “I’m gd she’s your girlfriend, not mine.”

  Nat just smiled.

  --

  I wandered away from Nat and Rhodey, phone to my ear. “Yo, T-Dawg, what’s up?”

  There was a brief pause at the other end. “Hey, Red,” Tony responded after a moment. “You busy this morning? We’ve got a little bit of what I think is a magic situation under Midnd Circle and I thought you’d want to take a look.”

  “Oh!” Dragon bones! I’d forgotten all about those. Awesome. “Absolutely, sure. Did you want me to meet you there or…?”

  “You at the compound?”

  I nodded even though he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, just saw Nat and Rhodey off.”

  “I’ll meet you in the garage in five. We’ll drive down.”

  “Drive?” I made a face. I wasn’t super keen on being cooped up in a car with Tony for forty minutes, especially after what had happened with Ross yesterday—I was still feeling a bit heated and I’d probably end up snapping at him, which wouldn’t help anybody. “Why are we driving? Why doesn’t anyone want to use portals anymore?”

  “I’ve got some other stuff to take care of in the city after. C’mon, it won’t take that long.”

  Part of me just wanted to argue for the sake of arguing, but I bit my tongue. Tony had—miraculously—actually called me, after all. He was keeping me in the loop. This was what I’d wanted. Being bitchy about things for no real reason would be incredibly counter-productive. Ugh. I was going to have to grit my teeth here and just deal with it. “Alright, fine. One condition: I get to pick the music.”

  He snorted. “Sure thing, Red. See you in five.”

  Ten minutes ter, the two of us were cruising toward the city proper in Tony’s Audi R8—a sleek, low-slung orange two-seater. I tapped away at the screen of my smartphone, bringing up Spotify and scrolling briefly while I decided what I wanted to py. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony take a deep breath, obviously bracing himself as though he was making an entirely unwarranted assumption that I would pick something he wasn’t going to enjoy.

  …To be completely fair, I did have a pylist that was composed entirely of 90s cartoon themes and it would be objectively funny to make Tony listen to it. That’d learn him.

  On the other hand, I was trying to be nice. What did I know of Tony’s musical tastes? Not that much, but I did know he was a cssic rock enjoyer. Bck Sabbath’s Iron Man would be cheeky, he might get a grin out of that. Although, if I put on that, or something like AC/DC or GNR, he might think I was deliberately pandering to his tastes. Did I want him to think I was pandering to him? Maybe, maybe not, hmm… Ah. I tapped triumphantly at the screen, having picked the perfect song to open with.

  “Do you really wanna, do you really wanna taste it?!”

  Tony visibly rexed a little, tension leaving his shoulders and a small smile ghosting across his face as Do You Wanna Taste It by Wig Wam started. As he drove, his fingers started to tap at the steering wheel in time to the music and, for the next three minutes, we enjoyed the music together. I wiggled a little in my seat, dancing in pce as much as the bucket seat and seatbelt would allow as I quietly sang along to the lyrics.

  As the music finished, I grinned over at Tony, who shot me a quick gnce out of the corner of his eye and gave a small nod of acknowledgement in return. I let Spotify pick the next song—Avenged Sevenfold’s Hail to the King—and Tony tapped at the controls on the steering wheel, dropping the volume to a level where we could talk over it comfortably.

  “You know,” I commented idly before he could say anything. “If I wore a watch, I’d be looking at my wrist really condescendingly right about now.”

  “I could drive faster,” Tony suggested. “But I hear you don’t handle that sort of thing very well. Maybe we should have taken the Prius. More your speed.” The corner of his mouth tweaked upwards as he gnced over at me. “You and I never just hang out like this. Why is that?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I dunno. It’s weird, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe we should do it more often.”

  “Oh, no,” I corrected him. “I mean this is weird. Right now.” There was a brief pause before I couldn’t hold my poker face any longer and chuckled.

  He grinned. “So… bit of a blow-up with Ross yesterday.”

  Ugh. Of course. “Look, I know what you’re going to say and—”

  “Nice.”

  I paused, my train of thought derailed by Tony’s seemingly enthusiastic approval. “…Okay, I didn’t know what you were going to say,” I amended. “You’re not going to yell at me about it?”

  Tony let out a derisive snort, drumming the steering wheel absently with his fingers. “Gss houses, stones, all that. Did you know that the World Security Council originally wanted to get Blonsky—Abomination—as part of the Avengers? Called him a war hero, bmed everything on Bruce and Sterns. They ordered SHIELD to negotiate Blonsky’s release.” He smirked. “Guess who they sent to talk to Ross?”

  I vaguely remembered this. “You.”

  “Yep. This was back when Nat had assessed me as ‘unsuitable’ to join the Avengers, so I was called in as a consultant. Ross and I…” Tony paused, his expression thoughtful as he searched for the right way to describe his retionship with Ross. “Well, let’s just say that, comparatively? You and I are best friends. Pissed him off so much he tried to have me removed from the bar we were in, so I bought it.”

  “You… bought it?” Okay, didn’t quite remember that bit.

  “Right then and there, yeah. Then I had him kicked out. Then I had the bar demolished.” Tony gave a little shrug, a look of smug self-satisfaction flitting across his features. “It was his favourite bar.”

  “Nice,” I echoed his earlier acknowledgement, nodding slowly. I mean… it was kind of a gross capitalist flex, but I was willing to forgive that a bit given the target.

  “Gotta say, I didn’t call him a—what was it?—a ‘dickhead shitfuck’, though.” He chuckled softly. “I don’t think you’re supposed to call the US Secretary of State that.”

  “I didn’t call him that to his face,” I crified. “Besides, the fuck I can’t. Where does it say that? Where’s the rule that says I can’t call him a dickhead shitfuck? Especially when he’s being a dickhead shitfuck?”

  Tony clicked his tongue. “You’re lucky Steve isn’t here. He doesn’t like that sort of talk.”

  I grinned again, leaning back comfortably in my seat. Surprisingly, this wasn’t actually awful. Here I was, joking and hanging out with Tony Stark, the two of us not at each other’s throats for once. Why hadn’t we done this before? I mean, obviously, there were reasons why we hadn’t but—when he wasn’t being an arrogant ass—Tony could be a fun guy. If he was genuinely going to make an effort, I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I could get used to this.

  “How’d this morning go, by the way?” I asked. “With Darcy?”

  “Really well,” he said with a nod. “I think she’s gonna fit in just fine. Lotta feminine energy in the bs these days, though. Feeling a bit outnumbered.”

  “Nature is healing.”

  “Do me a favour, though? Let her settle in a bit before you try to get her into bed.” He chuckled softly to himself, shaking his head wonderingly. “I really never thought that I would be the one saying that to someone else. Pep would think this was hirious.”

  I cleared my throat. “I think it’s really rude, the way people just assume I’m going to try to sleep with everyone.”

  Tony side-eyed me. “She not your type?”

  “I didn’t say it was wrong, I said it was rude,” I said primly, folding my arms.

  “Hey, you don’t try to sleep with everyone,” he pointed out. “You didn’t try to sleep with me.”

  “Eh,” I shrugged. “You’re with Pepper and… I dunno. Maybe, if you weren’t, and things hadn’t blown up with Eliza the way they had… Eh, nah. You couldn’t handle me, anyway.”

  He scoffed. “Excuse me? I may be a little past my pyboy days, but…”

  “Tony, I am a ride you would not survive,” I said seriously. “I mean, think about it. You’ve seen how much of a people pleaser I can be. That, plus the enhanced stamina and telekinesis? Trust me, the wheels come right off.” He started to respond and I held up a hand. “I’m not saying that to brag—I’m saying it as a warning. Most days, I’m honestly surprised Nat can even walk. As good as you think I might be? I’m better. As good as you can imagine I am? I’m better.”

  Tony leaned back and let out a genuine ugh. “You know, I think we actually would have gotten along great if we’d met, like, seven years ago.”

  Seven years ago would have been… right around Afghanistan. When everything had changed for him. Peak promiscuous, party-boy Tony Stark. “Seven years ago, I would’ve only been 19,” I noted.

  He winced a little at that, still half-smiling. “Yeah, I wasn’t really a great guy back then. I thought we’d already established that.”

  I snorted softly in amusement, watching the buildings roll by on either side of us. My hands fiddled idly with the edge of my dress. This was a little bit exciting—in the original timeline, when the Defenders had teamed up to defeat the Hand, Midnd Circle had colpsed, re-burying the dragon bones beneath it. There’d never been an opportunity for them to be anything other than a MacGuffin.

  I knew of a few living dragons around the pce, like the giant golden dragon god in Omnipotence City, the Great Protector of Ta Lo and Shou-Lao in K’un-Lun. All of them seemed to be pretty powerful, and their bones obviously retained some sort of mystical qualities—the entire point of the Hand’s operations in New York had been to secure the bones for whatever the processes were that let them make themselves ageless and bring back their dead, after all—but I’d never seen if anything else could be done with them. I might have had unrealistic expectations, having pyed far too much Skyrim in my other life, but part of me was vaguely wondering if we could maybe make like a cool dragon bone staff that would help me channel my magic or something.

  Even if it turned out that I, personally, couldn’t do anything with them, it was still going to be cool to get to see the giant dragon bones in person. Handing something like that over to Kamar-taj might earn us some brownie points with the Ancient One, too.

  Thinking about dragon bones and the Hand made me wonder how Matt was doing. We’d talked briefly when I’d asked if he’d been willing to represent me if needed, but apart from that we hadn’t really caught up in a while. Gao’s drug smuggling operation would probably have fallen apart without her, even without interference from the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Nobu’s ‘Yakuza’ had lost their backing, and presumably Stick and Elektra would be cleaning the remnants up, too. Elektra wouldn’t become the Bck Sky now… where did that leave her? Would she leave town with Stick? Team up with Matt? Even before her death, she was a bit of a loose cannon. With any luck, Matt would take my warning and stay with Karen.

  And then, inevitably, thinking about Matt made me think about Jessica. Yet another person that I’d liked and wanted to be friends with that I’d alienated simply by existing. Her office was literally just a block away from our destination, too—she was so close by, but there was a gulf between us that I was pretty sure I’d never be able to cross. I knew there was no point dwelling on it, that it would be better to just focus on the things I could do, but still. It was hard. I shifted slightly in my seat as we headed onto the bridge into Manhattan, trying to push away the unhappy thoughts and focus on the matter at hand.

  Dragon bones.