Title: An Ever Fixed Mark

Author: seanchai and elspethdixon

Rating: PG-13

Pairings/Characters: Steve/Tony, Jan, Hank, Wanda, assorted other Avengers

Labels: gender-swap

Warnings: This fic deals with pregnancy, abortion, and miscarriage.

Part Five:

They were supposed to have been discussing hiring Rhodey on as a contractor to help perform some tests on SI's newest aircraft designs. Those discussions, and anything else even approximating doing any kind of work, had stopped instantly the moment Tony had announced his and Steve's decision.

Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy all stared at him blankly, until Pepper finally broke the silence.

She raised her eyebrows at him, arms folded across her chest, and pointed out, "The media is going to eat you alive."

Tony winced. "I was hoping we could keep this from turning into a media circus." It was probably a futile hope, but surely people were eventually going to get tired of seeing him on television. Maybe they would get lucky, and some movie star would allow herself to be photographed naked between now and next month, or the President would turn out to have a secret illegitimate child -- though if there were even the slightest possibility of the latter, someone would have dug it up long ago, before the election.

Pepper did not actually roll her eyes, but Tony could sense her desire to do so as clearly as if she had. "You're getting married to Captain America. Of course it's going to be a media circus."

Tony fought down the impulse to snap at her. It wasn't her fault that he and Steve were both national --international, to be honest -- celebrities, or that J.J. Jameson was probably going to trumpet Captain America's wedding to a formerly male and infamously debauched businessman as a sign of the moral decay of America. Or maybe not. One could never tell with Jameson; sometimes he displayed surprising flashes of liberal open-mindedness when you least expected them. Well, in between railing against superheroes as dangerous criminals and threats to public safety and printing the most unflattering photos of Hilary Clinton he could find.

The Bugle had been a strong backer of McCain up until he'd selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. Then Jameson had run a page-long editorial on how shooting moose had nothing whatsoever to do with running a country and switched to supporting Obama, to pretty much universal shock and amazement.

Regardless, he wasn't going to miss the opportunity to boost circulation with front page pictures of Captain America's wedding, and neither was any other major news outlet. It was enough to make Tony seriously consider eloping to Vegas, except that a) Steve would refuse and b) Jan and Jarvis would both kill him.

Rhodey, leaning back in Tony's desk chair with the newly re-modeled helmet to the War Machine armor cradled in both hands, was smirking openly at him. "Are you going to be wearing a wedding dress?"

Tony shook his head, seizing on the distraction with, not relief exactly, but something close to it. "No. I'll be wearing a tuxedo or suit of some kind, whatever Jan decides to inflict on me. In black, not white, before you ask. She's apparently designing it to compliment Steve's mess dress."

"The Civil War re-enactor-style one? With the red lapels?" Rhodey snickered. "He's going to jingle when he walks. I hope he's already ordered the miniature copies of all his six hundred medals, because some of those aren't going to be available at the nearest base PX. Do they even make a miniature of the Croix de Guerre?"

"No," Tony said. "I checked." Just the memory of Steve's crimson-faced embarrassment at the idea of wearing all his countless military honors was enough to make Tony's worries about whatever Jan was going to make him wear bearable. "He's going to have to wear the full sized version."

"Who's going to give you away?" Happy asked. His poker-face was as perfect as ever, but Tony thought he sounded pleased. "Because if you need someone to, boss, you know that I-"

"We're not doing a big wedding," Tony interrupted. "We'll be in a courtroom. Nobody's giving me away. You'd be the first person I'd ask after Jarvis, though, if I needed someone to."

"Does that mean there's not going to be a sword bridge? I've waited my whole life to smack Captain America on the ass with a sword."

Rhodey, Tony felt, sounded entirely too gleeful about the whole thing. He was probably already planning to throw Tony a terribly humiliating bachelor party -- if you could have one of those without alcohol. Luckily, tradition demanded that whatever party Clint and Sam threw for Steve would have to be separate, so at least their fun wouldn't be spoiled by Tony inability to drink. Or rather, inability to stop drinking. He was perfectly capable of picking up that first glass; he'd proven that over and over. "Steve's ass belongs to me now," he said, shoving those thoughts aside and grinning at Rhodey. "You had your shot at one of us, and you chose not to go for it."

"Smart man," Pepper commented dryly.

ooOOoo

"You don't think you're jumping into this a little quickly?" Sam ducked under Steve's punch and backed away from him, moving on the balls of his feet. "You've been seeing each other for what, two months?"

"I'm more sure about this than I've been of anything in a long time. It just," Steve spun on his right foot and kicked out at Sam with his left leg, only to have Sam block the blow with his forearm at the last moment. "It feels right."

Sparring with Sam was both less playful and a better work out than sparring with most of the rest of the Avengers; with Wanda and Clint, Steve still thought of himself as a teacher, and probably always would, and with Tony, sparring had a way of turning into something else entirely. It had been the same way with Sharon, and with Rachel.

Steve didn't have to hold back, knowing that Sam was the same height as he was and closer to the same mass than either Tony or Clint. He didn't have to pull punches, because Sam wasn't going to let Steve hurt him. Not like Tony, who after years of hand-to-hand combat training still had a habit of leaving himself wide open to blows that he ought to have dodged or blocked, because the armor would have been able to absorb them.

He threw a jab at Sam's torso, already knowing which direction he was going to turn in order to let the punch slip past him, and followed it up in quick left hook that connected solidly with Sam's jaw.

Sam made a face at him, rubbing his chin, and said, "If you get last minute cold feet and try to run away to California like you did with Bernie, Hawkeye's just gonna send you right back. And he'll never let you live it down." His strike landed cleanly on Steve's right shoulder, and he rolled easily back to his feet when Steve grabbed onto his arm and used the momentum of the blow to throw him.

"I won't get cold feet. Why does everyone keep second guessing me?" Steve launched another spin kick at Sam's upper torso, only to find his ankle grabbed firmly in both Sam's hands.

"Because a couple of months ago, you and Tony were barely even talking to each other, and now you're getting married," Sam said, and kicked Steve's foot out from under him, releasing his ankle just in time to let him fall flat on his back. "And that's not even touching the part where he started out as a guy."

Well, if Sam wanted to play rough... Steve didn't even bother to roll back to his feet; he simply thrust one of his legs between Sam's and brought him down that way, then lunged for him. "You know that doesn't matter to me," he reminded Sam, once he had him securely in a hammerlock.

Sam grudgingly tapped out, and Steve let him go. "What if he changes back?" he asked, climbing back to his feet and rubbing ostentatiously at his shoulder. "What are you going to do then?"

"Be happy for him," Steve said flatly. Sam knew gender wasn't important to Steve, even if he tended to forget because Steve had previously been involved almost solely with women; he couldn't actually think Steve had only fallen in love with Tony because he had a female body.

"Even if it means your marriage won't be legal anymore?" Sam raised his eyebrows, the question serious rather than challenging.

"Then we'd get to be a historic, precedent-setting court case." Being a nationally famous living legend had to be good for something, and Steve wasn't above using Captain America's reputation and name in order to get a more desirable outcome. Not for something like this, where it would benefit countless other people as well as Tony and himself.

"Does Tony know you're already planning your appeal to the state supreme court on his behalf?" Sam shook his head, grinning, and answered his own question. "Nevermind, he's marrying you. He probably does."

Steve didn't dignify that with an answer. "So... you're okay with being my best man, right?" he asked, as the two of them picked up their towels and left the gym.

"I'd be offended if you asked anyone else. I thought Tony said it was just going to a legal thing in a courtroom, though. Have you talked to him about this?"

Several times, but Tony's stubbornness was legendary at SI for a reason. It would probably take at least another week to wear him down. Steve believed in persistence, though. "If Tony really thinks the two of us are going to get married without dozens of Avengers and former Avengers and half of SHIELD coming and expecting a giant party..." He shook his head. "He knows perfectly well that people are going to expect us to have some kind of ceremony in addition to the legal element. The question isn't whether people are going to come and throw rice at us, it's whether or not they're going to come in costume."

"So," Sam said, after considering that for a second, "are you going to have one of those sword bridge things?"

ooOOoo

"I suppose it's too late to talk you into eloping to Vegas?" Tony's hair was a mess, half of it sticking up and the rest hanging in his face, and the mark Steve's had left at the base of his throat was already turning a nice, incriminating red. He wasn't going to bother to wear a shirt with a collar that would cover it tomorrow, either; Tony didn't care who knew that he'd been having sex. In fact, Steve was starting to suspect that he liked leaving obvious signs of what he'd been up to on display. Or was that part of Tony's 'careless playboy who couldn't possibly be Iron Man and wasn't about to outbid your company into the ground' persona?

"If we're getting married, I want to do it right," Steve told him. "And anyway, Jan would kill us. Sam would kill us. He's already threatened to have Clint drag me back here by my heels if I panic and run off to the West Coast."

Tony pushed himself up on one elbow, the sheet sliding further down his naked torso to pool at his hips. "If you do that, I'll drag you back here. Or I could drag you to Caesar's Palace. They like me there. I always make sure to spend enough on gratuitous room service bills to make up for cleaning them out at the tables. Or, I did." He made a wry face. "I generally accomplished that by buying incredibly expensive champagne by the case."

"We're not getting married in Vegas," Steve said patiently. Tony didn't actually mean it, he knew, but given too much encouragement, he might decide to do it just for the hell of it. Booking the honeymoon suite in a luxury hotel at a moment's notice was next to impossible for most people, but money was no object for Tony.

"Rhodey wants to have full military honors."

Steve let himself fall back onto his back, smiling up at the ceiling. He was not going to admit liked the idea; this was important, Tony was important, and since they weren't getting married in church, it would be nice to have at least one formal ritual to solemnize the occasion. "He just wants a chance to hit both of us on the ass with swords."

"Pepper's going to help Jan organize it and send out invitations," Tony said, his voice dry. "Happy wants me to... okay, Happy's suggestions are actually good, but that doesn't mean this isn't going to be the most embarrassing experience of our lives."

"It can't possibly be more embarrassing than some of the things that have happened to us while in costume."

"Or out of costume," Tony muttered. "Remind me to tell Pepper that Morgan is definitely not invited."

Considering that Tony's cousin had sold him out to supervillains at least twice and had tried put the moves on him the last time they'd met, no, he probably didn't merit a wedding invitation. Very few of Tony's acquaintances outside the superhero community and Stark Industries did, Steve suspected. Especially not the people who had gone to fancy parties with Tony and watched cheerfully from the sidelines as he drank himself into oblivion. "That guy from the charity ball isn't invited, either."

"Who? Oh, him. Why would he be there? He's nobody important."

"No," Steve agreed.

"Clint thinks that you should get married in costume."

"I know. I want to do this without masks. I'm not marrying Iron Man; I'm marrying you. And anyway, the newspapers would go nuts over that."

"They'll go nuts anyway. You look very good in costume. All that tight leather." Tony smirked at him, eyes lowering to stare at the fold of sheet covering Steve's groin and leaving no doubt as to which part of Steve he thought looked good in tight leather. His smirk faded a bit then, and he added, voice still light, "Hank thinks this is a bad idea and we're going to jinx our relationship and doom ourselves forever."

Yes, clearly it was Hank who was worried, and not Tony, Steve thought affectionately. "Hank's experiences with marriage are not universal," he said firmly.

Tony shrugged one shoulder, the motion making his breasts move interestingly. "Just so you know," he said, "you still have the right to haul off and slug me if we ever get into a fight." He offered Steve a familiar slightly-lopsided grin, the wry one he always used when he was being self-deprecating, totally oblivious to Steve's internal wince of horror at the thought of hitting someone I anger who was non-superpowered and nearly a hundred pounds lighter than he was. "I need some sense knocked into me occasionally."

"Adults don't solve their problems by hitting each other," Steve said, choosing to ignore the times that he and Clint had done exactly that. "They talk to one another." He hesitated, then, added, "You can talk to me when you have problems, you know. When something is wrong."

Tony glanced away, fiddling with a fold of the sheet. "I know. I'm trying." He looked up again, seductive smirk back in place, and leaned down, putting one deceptively delicate hand on Steve's shoulder. "Let's talk later," he said directly into Steve's ear, his voice low and husky; Tony knew perfectly well what it did to Steve when he sounded like that, and took shameless advantage of it. Tony's tongue ran along the edge of Steve's ear, warm and wet. "I can think of better things to do now," he whispered, breath cool against the wet patch of skin he'd made. The he pulled back, eyes once again dropping to Steve's crotch and the evidence of what exactly that particular tone of voice was accomplishing.

He was trying, Steve knew. Or at least, he hoped. He let the subject drop, along with wedding plans and whatever their teammates thought, and leaned up to close the distance between them again, capturing Tony's with his. His hands fit perfectly around the slim curve of Tony's waist, like they belonged there.

Tony slid over and forwards, settling his weight on top of Steve. "I really love the super soldier serum," he observed, and then set about demonstrating how much.

ooOOoo

Agatha's house had been a sanctuary for Wanda once; she had learned so much there, and Agatha had been there for her through her marriage, her pregnancy, through losing the twins, losing Vision.

It should have felt like a sanctuary still. It was Wanda's own worries and insecurities that made her feel uneasy here, in Agatha's parlor. Her own fears that made the shadows that gathered in the candlelit room feel ominous.

Losing her had been like losing a parent all over again, and her return had been an unexpected, almost miraculous gift. Without Agatha's intervention, Wanda would never have been able to break away from Immortus's control. For that, and for the memories of her children that Agatha had returned to her, she would always be in the older woman's debt.

Painful as it was to remember everything she had lost, she wouldn't have given up the memories for anything. If their own mother didn't remember them, then it truly would have been as if the twins weren't real, had never really existed.

Sometimes, she almost hoped they hadn't been. Hoped they'd only been her imagination and will manifesting itself through her powers, the way Agatha had claimed, without a reality of their own -- if they weren't real, that meant they wouldn't have suffered when Mephisto had taken them.

She had thought she was getting over it, moving on, but Tony's brief pregnancy had brought all of the memories, all of the grief back.

"Do you think it's possible that my powers somehow affected Tony?" she asked Agatha, staring down at the shifting reflections in her teacup. Agatha's tea service was as comfortingly familiar as her house, the roses painted on the side of the fragile china cups worn and faded with age. "That I ill-wished him somehow? I never wanted anything bad to happen to my friends, but there are times when it seems as if the people around me are cursed."

Tony hadn't wanted to be pregnant. Had she resented him for that, for rejecting something she had wanted to badly? Or maybe she had subconsciously let her powers influence him, hexed him without intending to, because part of her had wanted to help him.

That was an even more frightening thought, somehow. A hex placed on Tony's unborn child could have done far worse to him than a relatively uncomplicated miscarriage. She could have given him an ectopic pregnancy, eclampsia, made his miscarriage turn septic, all with the best of intentions.

She had thought she was gaining more control over her powers, working with Strange, but if there was any chance she had caused this...

Or maybe her ill-luck powers were interfering in an even simpler way: why had she and Strange, with all the power and knowledge at Strange's disposal, been unable to break the curse that kept Tony trapped in a female body? What if the nature of her magic -- chaos based, just like Loki's -- was actually feeding the curse somehow instead of weakening it?

Agatha was frowning, shaking her head. "You have a good heart, child. You would not wish your friend ill, no matter how much his circumstances pained you, how unfair you felt them to be."

"I wouldn't do it on purpose, but you know as well as I do that my powers haven't always been under my control."

Agatha raised her eyebrows, her eyes in their nest of wrinkles suddenly sharp. "What does Stephen think?"

"I... haven't mentioned it to him," she admitted. Strange had only reluctantly agreed to take her on as a student, and his own powers were so perfectly controlled. Clea's, too -- the other woman had been using magic her entire life, much as Wanda had, but Clea was centuries older than she was, with far more experience.

Admitting to both of them that she might have been influencing things around her without meaning to was... she had nearly mentioned the subject several times, but had never quite been able to make herself do it.

Agatha added another spoonful of sugar to her tea, nodding sympathetically. "Stephen can be very intimidating. He holds himself to an impossible standard and expects everyone else to follow it. I suspect it's why he usually doesn't take pupils."

Was it an impossible standard? She had been making progress, she knew, and she'd been certain that with enough work, she could attain the kind of control that seemed to come so effortlessly to Strange, regardless of the fact that her powers worked differently.

She took a sip of her tea. It was tepid now -- she had been holding the cup for at least fifteen minutes, not drinking, just letting it warm her hands. Under the sugar, it had a bitter aftertaste. "He does hold himself to a high standard," she admitted. "It's driving him crazy that we haven't been able to break the curse on Tony. We thought at first that the... pregnancy... meant that it was evolving, tightening its hold, but it turned out to be a trap Loki had built into the spell all along." She shook her head. "Loki likes double-crosses and traps, but his spells are never that complex. Strange suspects another sorcerer's hand in it, and I agree. Something about the spell feels... familiar."

The nagging sense of familiarity had bothered her from the beginning; some elements of the curse were similar to the magic that she had used on herself -- under Agatha's guidance -- to conceive the twins.

Agatha frowned. "Familiar in what way?"

"I'm not sure. I keep thinking that I may be imagining it, because Loki's powers and my powers are both chaos based, but I sense Chthon's touch in it. Loki's a chaos deity, but Chthon is raw chaos itself, and the magic wrapped around Tony is raw chaos. That's part of what makes it so difficult to counter. And the structure of the spell..." She took another sip of her tea, resisting the urge to wrinkle her nose at the taste, then set it aside. "It feels more like witchcraft than sorcery."

More like witchcraft. Like the spell Agatha had shown her to make her own womb conceive when she shouldn't have been able to.

She yawned, suddenly tired, her eyelids feeling heavy. The shadows dancing at the edges of the candle light seemed to thicken, reaching out across the carpet toward her.

The air felt wrong. There was chaos energy here. Energy much stronger than her own aura, stronger than the elevated levels of chaos power she had sensed in the air over the past month. That was why she hadn't felt comfortable in the room at first.

Powerful magic had been worked here. Dark magic.

In Agatha's house? Who would dare invoke the likes of Chthon or Dormammu in Agatha's house?

"Like witchcraft?" Agatha pursed her lips. "You should have come to me, child. I know more about witchcraft than any woman alive. I have studied it for over three hundred years."

"I should have," Wanda admitted, feeling a pang of guilt. She had drifted away from her old teacher recently, had... wait, no, there was dark magic in the room. Why was she letting herself get distracted?

She shook her head, standing, and felt a wave of dizziness that left her clutching at the arm of Agatha's overstuffed Victorian couch. "There's something here," she said. "In your house. Something dangerous. Something's been summoned here."

Agatha smiled gently at her. "I know it has, dear. I summoned him." She was standing now, one hand on Wanda's arm -- when had she moved? "Sit back down and finish your tea. You're perfectly safe. I've made certain of it."

Summoned him? Summoned who? Safe from what? Wanda pulled away, yanking her arm free from the other woman's grasp.

This wasn't right. Why couldn't she think?

"What's in the tea?"

Agatha was still smiling at her. "Just something to help you relax. I couldn't have you interfering in the ritual. Not after all the trouble I went through to set up another vessel for chaos power and gain possession of a copy of the Darkhold scrolls."

"You drugged me!" Another vessel. Another vessel for whatever she had-- God, was she summoning Chthon?

"I had hoped you could remain innocent of my master's plans until they had already come to pass. It seems Stephen and I taught you too well."

"Master's?" Wanda forced back the dizziness from the drugged tea, thanking whatever powers watched over witches and mutants that she had only taken a few sips of it, and raised her hands, letting her chaos power gather around them.

"You do not think it was your power alone that brought me back?" Agatha's familiar face was suddenly sinister in the pinkish-red light of Wanda's power. Wanda stared at her in horror, feeling as if the floor had dropped out from under her feet. "I was returned to life to serve a purpose, to serve him. His will brought me back into existence."

She couldn't concentrate well enough for a complicated spell, but a simple hex sphere could pull the heavy curtains down over Agatha's head, knock the candles over... open flame had such a high probability of starting fires. "Agatha, this isn't really you! You're stronger than this, better than this. You can fight him. You don't have to be Chthon's puppet." Agatha was a good woman. She had taught Wanda nearly everything she knew about magic, had saved her from Immortus, from the instability of her own powers. Surely she had to retain some free will, or she would have stood aside and let Immortus take Wanda.

Agatha shook her head grimly. It still seemed like her, Wanda thought, not like a puppet animated by Chthon's power, but like Agatha.

"He has but to withdraw his power, and I will die again. I didn't live three centuries to perish now."

Agatha was a servant of Chthon. She was the one who had helped Loki craft the curse he had cast on Tony. She was going to call Chthon up to inhabit a human vessel, the way he had once possessed Wanda.

"I can't let you do this," Wanda said. "The real Agatha wouldn't want me to." She drew her arm back, gathered her power, and threw a hex sphere at Agatha. It splashed harmlessly against her skirts, the power fizzling out.

How much of Agatha was truly left? How much of the woman in front of her was simply Chthon's energy poured into an empty shell?

Please, Wanda thought, let it not really be her. She threw the next hex sphere at the candles.

This one connected. The candles spilled over onto the rug, flame whooshing around them like a tiny, soundless explosion, sparks catching and leaping to flame all over the carpet and the drapes. The chances of the heavy, dust-laden velvet catching fire were slim, but not with Wanda's power evening the odds.

Strange would have been able to teleport himself away. Agatha probably could, too, if she had Chthon's power at her beck and call. Wanda didn't have that option.

Agatha was between Wanda and the door. The only way out of the room was though her. Unless... they were on the first floor. Outside the window, it was only a three-foot drop into Agatha's flowerbeds.

She grabbed Agatha's heavy silver tea tray and threw it at the window, mimicking the motions she had seen Cap make so many times. Cap's training had mostly focused on hand-to-hand, but he had shown Clint how to throw his shield once, and she had been there to see it. Clint had been ridiculously smug.

The glass shattered under the impact, the fire roaring higher at the influx of fresh oxygen. Agatha was chanting now, her voice half buried by the roar of the flames. "Shemek Iref Wenek Tjhen Inek It-Ek Chthon Djedeni Emm-Maat..."

Wanda threw herself out the window, landing on her shoulder amid a bed of petunias and rolling back up to one knee, then forced herself to her feet and ran.

ooOOoo

"It does not seem meet to me that Doom should be permitted to walk free from this latest piece of villainy," Thor grumbled, glaring at the newspaper in hands. He had been following the United Nations hearings on whether Doom's attempt to cave half of Lower Manhattan into the sea constituted an act of war, and whether international trade embargos should be placed on Latveria, with poorly concealed ire.

Personally, Tony thought the entire thing was an exercise in futility. If trade embargos were as astoundingly effective against Latveria as they'd been against Cuba over the past fifty years, then maybe some time around 2060, Doom might finally learn his lesson and repent. Tony doubted it, though.

"Prosecuting him for his crimes would cause an international diplomatic incident with Latveria," Steve said. His arm was a warm weight over Tony's shoulders, and after a brief internal debate, Tony had given in and let himself rest his head on Steve's shoulder and enjoy it. What use was being a woman if he couldn't use it as an excuse to cuddle with Steve in semi-public? "Latveria and its allies would see it as a declaration of war," Steve went on. From his tone of voice, he didn't actually find the idea of a UN peacekeeping force invading Latveria an unpleasant one.

He was the only Democrat Tony knew who was all for military intervention. It was the torture of prisoners, the restriction of civil liberties, and the waging of war under false pretenses that he had objected to when he'd temporarily taken off his costume last summer, not the actual fact of the war itself.

"Doom sees everything as a declaration of war," Tony said snidely, "from having his medieval zombie army incinerated to Reed Richard having once beaten him at scrabble in college."

He was sitting with Steve on the living room sofa, Thor lounging in one of the room's massive armchairs across from them. Hank was either in the library or the lab, hiding from Jan, and Jan was in her room with fabric swathes and a design pad, avoiding Hank.

Tony had assumed, once upon a time, that one got to choose the clothing, decorations, and so forth for one's own wedding. Maybe some people did. Those people didn't know Jan Van Dyne.

"He hates you almost as much as he hates Reed." Steve's fingers were rubbing lazy circles on Tony's upper arm, and Tony could feel the heat of his body radiating through their clothes. "What did you do to him, anyway?"

"Posed too much of a challenge. He doesn't like 'worthy opponents' who then refuse his patronizing offers to join him and help conquer the world as his loyal minions." Tony's mind was only partly on the conversation, most of his attention focused on simply enjoying Steve's presence.

He should thank Loki, Tony mused absently. He would never have had this, had this much of Steve, without Loki's curse, and it was almost worth trading away his real body for. Spending the rest of his life with Steve, marrying him, was worth it.

Wearing the armor, running SI, designing things -- he could still do all of those. He hadn't lost anything important, and he'd gained more than he had ever hoped for a few months ago, when the most he'd dared hope for was that Steve might start talking to him again someday.

"He should not be allowed to escape punishment for his crimes simply because he rules a country." Thor tossed the paper aside in disgust; it landed on the end table with the front page facing up, one of the Bugle's stock photos of Doom glowering up at the ceiling.

"No," Steve agreed. "He shouldn't."

Steve, Tony decided, was cute when he was being idealistic. When he wasn't being infuriating because his ideals were blinding him to the only practical course of action.

The sound of the front door flying open with a crash -- it had rebounded against the wall, probably; Jarvis hated when people did that -- startled Tony out of his contented musings.

He, Steve, and Thor all leapt to their feet at once, racing for the front hallway.

They nearly collided with Hank, Sam, and Jarvis as they entered the foyer. Hank was wearing a lab coat, and still had a micropipette clutched in one hand. Tony spared a moment to hope that the clear liquid dripping from it wasn't anything poisonous or corrosive. Then he saw the soot-covered figure in the doorway, and forgot about anything else.

"Wanda!" Jan landed lightly on the floor, growing to full size as her feet touched the wooden floorboards, and rushed forward. "What happened?"

"Agatha is chasing me," Wanda blurted out, slapping with both hands at her long, full skirt, which was smoldering faintly in several places. "She tried to drug me. I don't know how far behind me she is."

"Agatha Harkness is chasing you?" Tony stared at her. There were scratches along both of her bare arms, and her clothes were covered in dirt as well as scorch marks. There was a crumpled petunia stuck in her hair. "Why?".

Wanda blinked at him, her expression indicating that this ought to have been obvious. "Because she's possessed by Chthon." She swayed slightly on her feet, and added. "And because I just burned her house down."

"You what?" Sam stared at her. He been working with Steve for years, Tony reflected, but moments like this made it obvious that he hadn't been on the Avengers for very long. The sheer amount of property damage they often caused took some time get used to -- there were New York City officials and members of SI's board who still weren't used to it.

"She's what?" Steve frowned, and half raised one hand toward his shoulder, reaching for a shield that wasn't there. "How do you know?"

"Because she told me. And because she was chanting a spell from the Darkhold grimoire when I left." She frowned thoughtfully for a second, then added, "And I think she's the one who helped Loki put that spell on Tony."

"But..." Tony shook his head; the thought of Agatha Harkness, Reed Richard's friend, Wanda's mentor, as an ally of Loki just didn't make sense. "Why would she care who ruled Asgard?"

Wanda shook her head. "I don't know. Chthon and Loki are both chaos deities, but I've never heard of a connection between them. Chthon doesn't have allies, just servants."

"And Loki has never willingly served anyone." Thor's face was grim. "I would have words with this Agatha Harkness."

Jan looked up from where she had been busily slapping out the still-smoldering embers in Wanda's skirt. "And she's coming here?"

Wanda nodded. "She wants to summon Chthon and let him possess a human vessel. She drugged my tea so that I wouldn't be able to interfere in her ritual."

"Which means she's probably performing it now." Steve had shifted into a combat stance, his weight on the balls of his feet and his jaw set with familiar determination. "We need to track her down and stop her."

"No." Wanda made a slashing motion with one hand, dismissing the statement. "No we don't. She's coming here. I can feel her coming. She's the source of the chaos power Strange and I have been sensing. I don't know how I didn't realize it before."

"How powerful is she?" Hank had folded his arms across his chest, the glass pipette forgotten in his left hand.

"She's over three hundred years old, she taught me almost everything I know, and she has a magical link to Chthon."

Who, Tony filled in mentally, was almost unimaginably powerful. He hated magic. He really, truly hated it.

Steve nodded sharply. "Right. Everyone suit up. I doubt will have much of a window before she gets here."

Thor, the only one of them already armed and in costume, caressed Mjolnir's handle absently. "Who doth she plan to use as a vessel for Chthon?"

"That's a good question." Steve frowned. "Whoever it is, we can't let her use an innocent like that. It could destroy them."

"I have a better question," Jarvis's voice was not loud, but it cut through the babbling in the room with ease, everyone automatically falling silent to let him talk. "If she means to perform a demonic ritual, why is she coming here to do it?"

No one had an answer to that one, unfortunately. Sam and Jan were already leaving the foyer, Jan pulling Wanda along behind her. Wanda seemed dazed; Tony wondered how much of Agatha's drugged tea she had drunk, or if she was just too shocked by her old teacher's betrayal to focus on anything else.

His briefcase and armor were back in Steve's room, where he'd left them last night. As he turned to go fetch them, Steve right on his heels, he saw Hank still standing by the stairs, indecision obvious in every line of his body.

"Don't just stand there," Steve snapped at him. "Go suit up, Avenger."

Hank shook his head, the motion jerky. "I can't wear that costume again. I won't-"

"Wear your old Goliath costume, then, or go find your Ant-Man helmet. We're going to need your help; it doesn't matter which costume you're wearing."

Hank's face twisted for a moment, his misery obvious. Tony felt a pang of sympathy. Steve didn't know what it was like not to be able to trust yourself, didn't really understand that it wasn't the specific costume that was the problem, but the act of wearing one at all, and the power and responsibility it brought with it.

"Just this once, Hank." Tony turned back, crossing the foyer to where Hank stood frozen by the foot of the staircase, and put one hand on his arm. "If you lose it again, we can deal with that after we've stopped Chthon from manifesting and destroying the world, okay?"

"What if I can't handle it? What if I hurt someone again?"

"You won't," Tony told him. It was lousy as far as reassurances went, because he had no way of knowing that for certain, but Hank had been stable for over a year, longer than Tony had been sober. And even if he had still been a manic, paranoid mess, they would still have needed him in the event that they ended up facing down Chthon.

Hank looked less than convinced, but he nodded, pulling his arm free of Tony's grasp, and started moving.

The seven of them, plus Sam's pet falcon, were waiting outside the mansion when Harkness arrived.

She appeared in a cloud of blood-red smoke that gave off so palpable a sense of wrongness that even Tony, who had the magical sensitivity of a rock and liked it that way, could feel it.

He had expected something like that. He hadn't expected her to have half the Masters of Evil along for the ride.

Zemo and Mr. Hyde stood flanking her, Zemo brandishing his stupid glue gun. Atlas loomed behind the three of them, and the Wrecker, crowbar in hand, stood beside him, tapping the enchanted length of metal against his palm as if already anticipating the feel of it slamming into Tony's armor again.

"You don't want to do this, Agatha!" Steve called out, hefting his shield in preparation for throwing it. "Go home before our witch drops a house on you, and no one will have to get hurt."

"And take your flying monkeys with you," Tony added.

"Cheap shots at my appearance don't become you, Iron Man," Hyde sneered.

"You're a smart man, Calvin." Tony spoke quietly, letting the armor's helmet amplify his voice. "Why are you helping her summon the embodiment of chaos? There's no profit in it for you."

"We are not here for gain!" Zemo flung his cloak back over one shoulder and struck a dramatic pose, glue gun aimed squarely at Steve. "I swore I would be avenged on you, Captain, and so I shall! What my team has not accomplished, the powers of chaos will do for us!"

Steve, of course, was incapable of not responding to that kind of supervillain posturing.

"You would sell out this entire dimension to Chthon simply to get petty revenge on me for sending you to prison?" he demanded, the disgust in his voice obvious.

Whatever reply Zemo might have made was cut short by a howl of wind as Agatha Harkness raised her arms skyward and began chanting, Wanda's hex spheres impacting harmlessly against some invisible shield several feet in front of her smoke-wreathed form.

She spoke softly, but the words somehow filled the air just as strongly and clearly as if she'd shouted them. They were in a language Tony had never heard; he assumed it was meant to sound threatening and eldritch, but magical incantations had always just sounded silly to him.

The lines of fire that began arcing through the grass around them as Harkness spoke were considerably more impressive and worrying.

"Stop her!" Steve ordered, pointing one red-gloved finger at Harkness.

Tony fired his jet boots and took off. Wanda's old teacher might be protected against her former student's magic, but that didn't necessarily mean that whatever sorcerous defenses she had would stand up against repulsor blasts.

Jan clearly had the same idea -- she was flying directly for Harkness's face, hands together in front of her, ready to fire off a bio-chemical stinger blast right into the woman's eyes.

Harkness waved one hand, as if swatting a fly, and a tendril of blood-colored smoke lashed out at Jan, knocking her out of the air.

"Jan!" Hank ran forward, still normal-sized, intent on reaching Jan's small, crumpled body.

Tony could see Atlas swing into motion almost before it happened. His massive fist caught a completely unaware Hank directly in the ribcage, sending him sprawling.

Tony forced down the instinct that insisted that he go help his teammates and brought his repulsor gauntlets up, aiming for Harkness. If she succeeding in raising Chthon, none of their lives would be worth a red cent anyway.

The lines of fire were still moving through the grass, slowly carving out what Tony, from his elevated vantage point, could now see was a giant, inverted pentagram.

He reminded himself firmly that however much Harkness might look like a fragile old woman, she was actually a powerful sorceress who was trying to kill them all, and fired twin repulsor blasts at her.

The smoke swallowed them, diffusing the two beams of energy into a broad, glowing cloud, then parted, revealing Harkness still chanting, completely untouched. Her eyes had begun to glow white, the way Wanda's had when Chthon had possessed her.

A second pair of repulsor blasts proved equally ineffective.

Around them, the Mansion's lawn had erupted into chaos. Thor and the Wrecker were whaling away on one another with hammer and crowbar, while Sam was piling blow after barely-effective blow on Mr. Hyde while Redwing dive-bombed his head, avoiding the man's return blows with an easy grace that broadcast as loud as a neon sign that he, like Tony, Clint, and Wanda, had been trained by Steve. Hyde could take more punishment than any human without weapons or superstrength could dish out; Sam was going to need--

"Get out of my way!" Hank yelled at Atlas, shoving himself back to his feet with a wince Tony could see even from twelve feet up in the air.

Atlas laughed. "Make me, little man."

"Little?" Hank started to grow, the size change surprisingly fluid considering that as far as Tony knew, he hadn't done this in over a year. "You're the one who's been running around calling himself Goliath, aren't you?" he snarled. "Let's see how you hold up against the real thing."

Zemo was shouting something at Steve, his faint German accent making him sound like the villain from a bad World war Two movie. Tony tuned him out, refusing to let himself look back to make sure that Steve was holding his own. He would be. He always did.

The burning pentagram below him was almost complete now. Tony increased the thrust from his jet boots and dove toward Harkness; her smoke tentacles had been able to knock Jan aside, but he had a lot more mass than Jan did.

The column of smoke that wrapped itself around his waist was as thick as a tree trunk and just as solid. The abrupt loss of momentum was as jarring as flying into a wall, rattling him around inside his armor in a way that was going to leave bruises later.

Repulsor blasts had no effect on it. Of course.

His armor bent with a groan of tortured metal as the tentacle tightened around him. Harkness clearly meant to crush the armor like a tin can, and Tony with it.

Wanda's hex sphere smashed into the 'trunk' of the tentacle just below Tony, and a wide segment of smoke vanished in a flash of pink light. The coil of smoke around Tony's waist turned insubstantial, only ordinary smoke now, and then he was falling.

He fired the jet boots again, bringing himself to a halt barely a foot above the ground.

Jan was back in the air, darting and weaving through the tendrils of smoke with a quick, irregular flight pattern that reminded Tony of a bat. If she could fight her way through to Harkness, then she could... what? There would still be the woman's magical energy shield to contend with.

They were all screwed, he reflected. They might as well go down fighting, though.

"Stop this, Agatha!" Wanda was screaming. "You know this isn't you! He's controlling you, using you!"

"When Chthon returns to this realm and takes possession of the vessel I have prepared for him, I will be rewarded above all other mortals." Her voice didn't even sound human anymore, resonant with weird harmonics that made the hair on the back of Tony's neck rise.

Surely Strange had to know this was happening? A magical event of this magnitude taking place practically on his doorstep would be impossible for him to miss.

Tony had never expected that he would pray for the Sorcerer Supreme to come and save them, but he seemed to have been doing that a lot lately. Maybe if Strange showed up in time, he'd have more success shutting down Harkness's ritual than he had breaking Loki's spell -- she wasn't a god, after all, just the servant of one.

"What vessel?" Wanda's hands were up in front of her, glowing with pink light, her fingers forming patterns in the air that looked an awful lot like one of Strange's invocations. "I won't let someone else become Chthon's puppet the way I did. No matter what I have to do to you in order to stop it."

"Do you honestly think you can stop me? You, a half-trained child?" Harkness shook her head, the mildly disapproving gesture ludicrously incongruous coming from a blazing-eyed avatar of chaos. "Such ingratitude. And after all the lengths I went to to get Loki to prepare me a second vessel of chaos magic in order to spare your life."

To get Loki to...

Tony stared at her in horror, feeling sick in a way that even the discovery that he was pregnant hadn't equaled.

She wanted to let Chthon possess him, use his body as a shell to house a demon. Burn his intellect and soul out of him and leave just an empty doll behind for Chthon to-

Loki materialized in the middle of the lawn with a rush of displaced air.

The fighting actually halted for a moment, as both the Avengers and the Masters of Evil all turned to stare at him.

"You!" Thor bellowed, turning away from the Wrecker and moving towards Loki, mjolnir raised threateningly. "I might have known this was your doing, Loki! Not content with your previous treachery, you join forces with Chthon to destroy Mitgard itself. Odin's wrath over this will make his previous punishments for you seem as nothing."

Loki, for once, ignored him. "Traitorous witch!" he shouted, stabbing one finger angrily at Harkness. "We had a deal! You've been planning to stab me in the back all along, haven't you?"

An answer would have been redundant, and he didn't wait for one.

"You couldn't have known that the spell would affect Iron Man instead of Thor when you planned this," Loki went on, his voice an ugly snarl. "It was supposed to be Thor! Not some worthless mortal. Thor! You were going to feed my unborn child to Chaos!"

There was an instant of silence, everyone else presumably as surprised as Tony was. Since when did Loki feel any kind of familial affection for anyone?

"Loathe as I am to admit this, my treacherous kinsman hath a point." Thor sounded aghast, through whether it was at the idea of being used as a vessel for Chthon, or over the fact that he was agreeing with Loki, Tony wasn't sure. "Only a monster would do such a thing to a woman who was with child."

"I think we've already established that she's evil, big guy," Jan said.

"No one double-crosses Loki and gets away with it." Loki brought one hand up, pointing it at Tony. "Let us see you perform your ritual when deprived of your vessel and sacrifice."

He waved his hand, the gesture almost negligent, and the world whited out in an explosion of pain. Tony didn't even have time to scream.

ooOOoo

"The Eye of Agamotto detected no trace of the curse," Strange said, fingering the enormous gemstone he wore around his neck. "You are completely free of the influence of chaos magic."

"Also genetically male again." Hank waved a computer print out at Tony as if it were some kind of prize. "Congratulations; your Y chromosome is back."

Steve probably ought to be saying something, asking questions, or off helping the police with the newly recaptured Masters of Evil, like a responsible team leader ought to. He wasn't contributing anything here; unlike Hank, Strange, Don, and Wanda, he had no scientific or magical knowledge.

He wasn't even sure if his presence was welcome -- Tony wasn't even looking at him. He was still staring down at his own hands, as he had been since he's woken up an hour ago and been pronounced unharmed by Don.

Steve couldn't bring himself to leave, though. He couldn't stop staring at Tony, at his flat, masculine chest, his broad shoulders, the line of hair that started beneath his belly button, just visible over the waistband of his trouser -- Don had made him take his shirt off, so that he could listen to his heartbeat without fabric getting in the way. It had been so long since he'd seen Tony in his original body. He had forgotten things.

The curved line of Tony's spine was the same, male or female; the way his lower back dipped in just a bit above the base of his spine was something that he'd always had. His face was less delicate than Steve remembered, the pointed chin gone.

The mustache and goatee were gone, too. They hadn't re-appeared when Tony had changed back, and without them, he looked almost as unlike himself as he had when female. He looked younger without the facial hair, and his face seemed narrower.

He had fallen out of the sky like a rock when Loki had reversed the spell, landing in a crumpled heap on the ground like so much discarded machinery, and Steve had stopped breathing, utterly convinced for one horrible, stomach-churning moment that he was dead.

Zemo had nearly taken his head off with a ray gun then, while he stood frozen, and Steve had knocked him unconscious with his shield without regard for what damage he might have done in the process.

Agatha Harkness had let out a scream of rage and turned on Loki, who had waved aside the spell she threw at him as if it were nothing before disappearing again. Then she had turned her attentions to Wanda, the only remaining potential vessel for Chthon to inhabit. Wanda had been able to defend herself, but Agatha's smoke tentacles had made it impossible for any of the rest of them to strike a blow against her, and the stalemate had been broken only by the arrival of Strange and Clea, his other student, who had joined forces with Wanda to cut off Agatha's access to Chthon's power and take her down.

She had dissolved into smoke then. Even Strange wasn't sure whether she had died, unable to use Chthon's power to sustain her life and physical form any longer, or simply escaped to another dimension.

Steve hadn't particularly cared. The thing that they had fought hadn't been the real Agatha Harkness -- from the sound of things, the real Agatha had been dead for a long time -- and it's potential demise had been meaningless next to the fact that Tony wasn't moving, hadn't moved since Loki had waved a hand at him and announced that he was depriving Agatha of her sacrifice.

When a still Goliath-sized Hank had pulled off Tony's helmet to reveal strangely unfamiliar masculine features, and announced that Tony was still alive, the wave of relief had been almost dizzying.

"I thought he'd killed you," Don was saying. He was checking Tony's heart for the second time, as if afraid whatever results he'd gotten the first time might change or prove untrue. "I wouldn't put it past him. He goes after people Thor cares about. Any child of the two of them would have spent its entire life as a hostage."

That hadn't occurred to Steve, and the thought that Loki could just as easily have killed Tony in order to seek revenge on Thor was chilling.

"I'm glad he didn't," Tony said. His voice had its old, familiar timber, the husky mezzo-soprano Steve had finally grown used to gone for good. "Hell, I ought to be thanking him. You have no idea how wonderful it is to have my own body back."

"It was always your body," Steve objected. The scars had proved that, and the other details that had still been the same, like the line of his profile and the feel of his hair. His hair would feel the same as a man, wouldn't it? Steve wondered if he would ever get the chance not find out. "It was just... different."

"One chromosome different," Hank confirmed. "Otherwise it was the same. I don't know where the extra mass went; not into a sub-atomic pocket dimension the way mine does, because I checked. Magic makes my head hurt." He rubbed at his forehead with one hand, and for a moment, he and Tony shared equally grumpy expressions.

"I don't want to think about where the mass went." Tony waved a hand dismissively. "The more I think about it, the less sense it makes."

"Magic does not follow the laws of logic," Strange said. "It is a thing of will and belief, the deeper reality that men dismiss as illusion."

"That's why I like my hex powers." Wanda gestured with one hand, as if throwing a hex sphere. "They manipulate probability, not reality itself." She turned back to Tony. "I don't see any sign of the spell, either." She looked away then, shaking her head. "I'm sorry that you got caught up in this. There must have been some scrap of Agatha left in there, since she didn't wish to use me as Chthon's vessels, but I couldn't get through to her."

"It's not your fault," Tony said, just as Steve said,

"You tried your best. You couldn't have known that she was possessed, and with Chthon's power animating her, I don't think one person alone would have been enough to take her out."

"It wouldn't." Strange dismissed the subject with two words and went to peer over Don's shoulder at the results of Hank's blood tests. "Loki was quite thorough. Your blood chemistry is completely normal again, as if you had never been altered in the first place."

"I could have told him that," Hank said. "In fact, I think I did." He sounded more like his old self than Steve had heard him sound in, God, almost two years. Was it being in a lab, surrounded by people he felt comfortable around, or the fact that he had used his size-changing powers again without losing control and without disaster striking?

Tony dropped his gaze to his hands again, shaking his head slowly. "The press is going to have a ball with this. They'd just gotten used to me being female." He didn't sound annoyed over the idea, though. There was something almost like awe in his voice.

He had given up the idea of ever returning to normal, Steve knew. That was what his proposal had been about, on one level. About seizing what he could have as a woman, because there seemed to be no hope of ever becoming a man again. He had rejected Don's suggestion of corrective surgery vehemently, insisting that sexual organs that were in perfect working order were preferable to ones that wouldn't work as well even if they were the wrong kind.

Marriage was out of the question now, of course, at least in New York. And that was assuming Tony still wanted to go through with it at all. He might not. Tony had a chance at a normal life again, now that the curse had been broken, and an open, public relationship with another man would destroy any prayer of a normal life. It would be a serious liability in the business world, too. He would lose even more of the respect he had fought so hard to regain.

"I'm going to need to recalibrate my armor again," Tony added. If anything, he looked pleased at the thought. "Do I have your permission to go, doctors?" He offered the room -- minus Steve -- a small smirk that once again looked at home on his face, though the lack of a moustache to frame it was still jarring.

What would it be like to kiss him now, to feel the rasp of stubble along his jaw, to wrap his arms around someone every bit as tall as he was? He had forgotten how gorgeous Tony was, or at least, forgotten the impact of it.

"Only if you rest," Don said. "You were unconscious for an hour, Tony," he added, before Tony could protest this. "You can play with your armor tomorrow."

Steve crossed the room and held a hand out to Tony. "I'll walk you to your room."

Tony stood on his own, ignoring Steve's outstretched hand. "You just want to spy on me for Don to make sure I actually get some sleep," he accused.

"You need sleep," Steve pointed out, forcing down the hurt caused by Tony's silent rejection. "If you swear on your repulsor gauntlets that you will go straight to bed, I'll let you leave on your own recognizance."

The fact that Tony was willing to swear the silly oath should have made him smile. Instead, he found himself hoping that Tony would refuse to, that he'd use Steve's promise to make him rest on him to get Steve to stay with him.

He tried not to be disappointed when Tony simply promised to follow orders and left.

ooOOoo

Hank shrugged back into his lab coat with an inner sigh of relief, and closed the storage cabinet door firmly on the folded pile of red fabric he'd just shoved inside it.

It had been years since he had worn his old Giant-Man costume. Hank would have been surprised that it still fit, but it was made of unstable molecules and could both stretch and shrink, so it would always fit, no matter what.

Nowadays, he could have simply saturated a costume with Pym particles and let it grow and shrink as he did, but the old red costume had been created before he'd been able to do that, before the Pym particles had soaked into his bone marrow and bloodstream and made his abilities permanent, and before he'd been able to transfer them from his body into inanimate objects.

Theoretically, he ought to be able to transfer them into other people, as well, but no one on the West Coast team had been willing to let him test this on them. Not even Clint, who'd used Pym particles before.

Taking it off and putting it away had been a relief. He knew that it wasn't the costume that had been responsible for his past mistakes, and his loss of control -- it had been his own personality flaws, and his own screwed up brain chemistry -- but wearing one again brought back too many memories. Good memories, which was why they were dangerous.

Being anything other than plain Henry J. Pym was too tempting.

He couldn't let himself want this again. He'd screwed it up to badly before to risk a second attempt.

Pounding Atlas into the ground had been deeply satisfying, though. Payback, Hank supposed, for the time he, the Man-Ape, and Ultron had trashed the West Coast Avengers' headquarters. Hank had been basically useless, then, letting Tony fight the three of them on his own until reinforcements showed up.

He was more useful to the team when he used his powers to their full extant, could do more good, could--

No. It would be a mistake. He was a scientist, first and foremost, and that was what he had to stay.

And there were still tests left for him to perform on Tony's blood samples. It was why he'd stayed behind in the lab after the others had left. This was his job, now, and he intended to do it right. He might not have been able to turn Tony back -- it had taken Loki's magic to do that -- but he could at least make sure that he and Don hadn't missed anything. Make sure that there truly were no side effects from all that time Tony had spent as a woman. Or from his brief and ill-fated pregnancy.

He wasn't going back to LA until he was sure he'd done everything he could to make sure Tony was okay.

Tony's blood had normal levels of testosterone and estrogen, his DNA had returned to normal... his blood chemistry seemed right, aside from a low iron count -- not surprising, since women generally had lower iron counts than men -- but there might be some anomaly Hank hadn't noticed yet.

The rest of the team would be finished talking to the press and the police now, and Steve would have gotten them all to gather in the conference room and go over the fight. What they had done well, what they needed to work on, how they had won and why.

Jan would be there. She might even be leading the post-mortem on the fight with Agatha Harkness and the Masters of Evil. She and Steve alternated as chairman of the team these days.

Hank carefully loaded a third sample of blood into the mass spectrometer, then sat back to await the results. Yes, he'd done this twice already, but this time he was searching for a different set of variable than the first two times.

The lab here was much better than the one in LA. He'd forgotten what it was like to work in a state of the art facility, fully outfitted with latest equipment. Tony always had the best toys, and he'd spent years amassing his collection at the Avengers Mansion, as opposed to the handful of months he had spent gathering the lab equipment for the West Coast headquarters.

The gleaming metal workbenches looked sterile and empty without an ant colony's terrarium set up on one of them. He hadn't taken them with him when he left -- no, when he'd been thrown out. He wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to them.

Jan wouldn't have thrown them out or killed them, would she? Maybe she'd let them go outside. It would have been perfectly safe to do so. They had only been Formica pallidefulva, common red ants, not Solenopsis invicta, or part of the Ecitoninae subfamily, or anything else exotic or potentially to the local ecology.

He hadn't brought an ant colony or any other insects in to the West Coast labs. He hadn't wanted to let himself get too at home there. It didn't seem like a good idea to let himself get too at home anywhere.

He was staring intently at the mass spectrometer, trying to will it to produce results, when someone knocked on the door frame. Wanda, probably; he'd heard her heels clicking on the hallway's wooden floorboards.

"Tell Cap I still have more tests to run for Tony," he said, without turning around.

"You can tell him yourself."

"Jan." Hank spun around, his face heating and the bottom dropping out of his stomach.

She was still wearing her Wasp costume. This newest version was another black and yellow number, with black tights and a bright yellow leotard, gloves, and boots. She'd originally started wearing that color combination to match Hank's Yellowjacket costume. He hadn't expected her to keep it.

She looked good in it. Even better than she had in her old red and blue costumes.

She was staring at him, Hank realized. It took effort to make himself met her eyes. The fact that she was even willing to be in the same room with him was more than he had any right to expect.

They ought to have sent someone else to come and fetch him. It wasn't fair to send Jan.

"I was just... there are tests I have to run. So I was, um, running them." He was babbling. He always babbled when he tried to talk to Jan, these days, even over the safe distance of a commlink. Once, he had been more comfortable with her than he'd ever been with anyone.

That had been before, though.

"Don told me," she said. "That you were still working down here." She hesitated, while Hank inwardly agonized over whether or not it would be okay to smile at her, whether that would be friendly or awkward, then said, "I need to talk to you."

[1] S. invicta = fire ants. Ecitoninae = South American army ants. It's not that Hank didn't want to keep either of those species as pets. It's that Jarvis wouldn't let him.

ooOOoo

Hank stared at her for a long moment, his expression frozen and faintly trapped. "What do you want to talk about?" he finally asked, his voice sounding strained.

Now that she was actually down here, face to face with him, the impulse that had led Jan to go looking for Hank seemed silly. What exactly was she here for? Closure? She'd already had that. She'd gotten a divorce. He had apologized and left. And that, as they said, had been that, until Hank had joined Clint's West Coast team and suddenly she was speaking to him over the Avengers' comm link again and hearing Clint mention him when he talked about what his team had been doing.

She had no business being down here, no reason to speak to him. It would just make things harder.

Except... Hank hadn't wanted to get back into costume today, and once upon a time, she had loved him, and she couldn't rest easily until she'd made certain that he was okay.

"You... did a good job today," she said awkwardly. Handing out encouragement like that was part of her job as Avengers' chairperson, but it felt patronizing saying it to Hank. He'd been an Avenger as long as she had, and shouldn't need to be told when he'd done good, but Hank was Hank, and he always needed to be told. She'd spent so much energy coddling his fragile self-esteem once, and she'd sworn she would never do it again, but... he had done a good job. And Hank tended to only believe things like that if someone else said them. That was, when he wasn't being over-confident.

Hank stared at her, face unreadable. "I- I did?" He shook his head. "I didn't want to do it. I wasn't using the situation as some kind of an excuse to get back into costume again."

Jan nodded. "I know. I heard you talking to Cap and Tony."

"Oh," he said. "I... didn't know you were there."

He probably hadn't wanted her to hear that conversation, she reflected. It couldn't have been easy for him to admit his fears of losing control again to Steve and Tony in the first place, let alone with her watching. "It wasn't the costume that was the problem, Hank," she said, faintly surprised at how gentle her voice sounded. "You know that."

Hank looked away. "I know," he said quietly. "You told me, before, that I needed to get some help, that I was out of control, and... I think I always knew that. I just couldn't stop. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't relax, and everything I felt was so overwhelming that I couldn't handle it. Looking back, it's so obvious that the things I did were just so incredibly stupid that I can't believe I did them, but I swear, at the time it all made perfect sense."

"I was angry with you," she admitted. "For a long time." She wasn't sure when that anger had gone away, when thinking of Hank had started to inspire regret instead of outrage. "You hurt me."

Hank winced. He actually seemed to get smaller, though she knew that was only an illusion. Standing in the same room with him, only a few feet away, she would be able to feel it if he actually used the Pym particles in his body to change size.

"I know. I... I'm sorry."

She shook her head. "That's not the only reason I was angry. I was angry at you for hurting yourself, for being so stupid, for throwing your career and our marriage and your membership on the Avengers away." Hank was one of the smartest men she knew, and he'd acted like an idiot, done things she'd known he knew better than to even try. She known, all along, that there had been something wrong with him, but it hadn't really penetrated until he'd already been arrested, after Egghead had tricked him into helping the supervillain with his latest scheme. She'd been too hurt, too angry, and the way Hank had acted hadn't made any sense. He had come within inches of getting half the team killed with his ridiculous plan to have a robot attack them to that he could stop it and save the day -- and thus prove that they should keep him on the team. So she had blamed him for letting himself fall apart that way, as well as for gambling with their team's lives and hitting her.

It hadn't been fair of her, she knew now. Only the second part had been his fault, not the first. At least he realized that his actions had been dangerous now. At the time, he'd seemed totally incapable of grasping that anything he did might have negative consequences.

"I didn't mean to," Hank said quietly. "I was trying to keep those things. By really stupid, dangerous methods. I can't go back and undo them, and I can't ever apologize enough, but I really am sorry. I... you need to believe that."

"I do," Jan said. If she hadn't before, she would have after today, after seeing how desperately uncomfortable merely putting a costume -- any costume -- on again had made him. After seeing him suit up again despite that, because the team needed him. "I know you're trying, Hank. I meant it, when I said you did a good job today." She smiled at him, and it only felt a little forced. "It's always nice seeing someone cut Atlas down to size. Last time we fought him, the Falcon managed to take him down single-handedly, with only his pet bird for help, but I was busy with Zemo, so I don't know how he did it."

"He probably had the bird go for his eyes while he dove for his legs," Hank said, that little crease that meant he was thinking about some problem appearing between his eyebrows. She'd thought it was cute, once upon a time. It was still cute now, honestly. "If he got him in the back of the knees, he could have knocked him off balance easily, given the extra momentum the dive from several feet up would have given him. The original Black Knight did it to me once."

"I remember that." Hank had grown to nearly thirty feet, the tallest he'd ever grown at that point, and the impact of his body with the street had actually made the ground shake. It had also taken out part of a building that the team had then had to pay for, the first in a long line of bills for property damage that the Avengers had received from the city. Hank had been black and blue from his shoulders to his knees, afterwards.

Which brought her back to her real reason for coming down here. "I saw Atlas knock you flying," she said, "before you started using your powers. Are you all right?"

Hank shrugged, the movement only slightly stiff. "Just a few bruises. It will remind me that being a superhero isn't as glamorous as it's rumored to be."

It wasn't really that funny, but Jan found herself laughing anyway. "Since when has being a superhero ever been glamorous?"

"You thought it was going to be." There had been a point in time when that statement, coming from Hank, would have been a dig at Jan for being vain, or naХve. Now, it just sounded teasing, if somewhat awkwardly so.

"I was young and innocent then. I didn't realize how hard it was to get costumes to drape properly and still stand up to abuse. Looking glamorous takes both planning and hard work."

They were actually talking, she realized, with a strange little jolt. Not yelling at each other, not trading blame or apologies. Actually talking, the way they had used to. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed it.

"You make it look easy," Hank said. Then he flushed. "Sorry. I know it's over between us, I do. I just... you're the most beautiful woman I've ever known, and I can't not notice it."

Hank, Jan knew from long experience, frequently didn't notice what women were wearing, and sometimes didn't even notice their hair color. But he still noticed her, even after their relationship's spectacularly messy ending.

She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

But... Hank was not only trying to rebuild his life; he seemed to actually be doing it, something she had thought impossible little over a year ago. And today... she still knew how to fight on a team with him, how to automatically dodge around where Hank's blows were going to be to get up close into a villain's face. It was how they had taken down Atlas, Jan providing the last-second distraction while Hank administered the knock-out punch.

"That part of my life is over, Hank," she said firmly. "But... the next time you guys need help out on the West Coast, give me a call. You may not be my husband anymore, but you're still my teammate."

Hank's eyes went wide. "Really? You know I don't-" he shook his head, hard. "I spend most of my time in the lab. Not exactly the sort of thing that needs re-enforcements."

"You never know when you might accidentally end up being shrunk and trapped in an ants' nest."

"N-no," Hank agreed, staring at her as if she were something miraculous. It would have been more troubling if she hadn't known that he looked at social insects and laboratory test results in the same way. "All kinds of things happen in labs."

Jan had had to steel herself in order to come down to Hank's lab. Leaving it again was much easier, but not, for the first time in months, because it meant that she was getting away from him. She'd had an entire conversation with Hank, and walked away neighed angry, disappointed nor worried. Maybe Tony being changed back to normal hadn't been the only piece of magic to happen today.

ooOOoo

The center of gravity for the armor was off again, not to mention the internal dimension. They'd needed to be scaled down slightly to accommodate the loss of five inches in height. Now, all the modifications Tony had made needed to be undone.

He had the armor completely disassembled, the parts scattered across two work benches and a significant portion of the floor; the lab and work area tucked behind his office at the main Stark Industries plant was smaller than the one in the Avengers Mansion. Reversing the changes he'd made while female didn't actual require him to take apart the repulsor gauntlets and the jet boots, but there were a few improvements to both that he wanted to test out. As long as he was working on the armor anyway, he might as well do a complete overhaul.

He'd almost started to feel comfortable in a female body, but having his own back was... he'd stopped expecting to ever be normal again, to be able to move in a fight without reminding himself that his reach was shorter, to look Steve and Sam and Hank in the eye instead of looking up at them. He'd missed that last the most, even more than the additional strength and mass that gave him better leverage when he was manhandling pieces of machinery into place.

It didn't feel real, yet. He still kept expecting to look in the mirror and see the female version of himself.

Once he had the armor fixed, things would be back to normal, and he would stop expecting something to suddenly resurrect Loki's curse and change him back again.

The media uproar had been slightly smaller than he'd expected; apparently Tony Stark changing back into a man was less newsworthy and fascinating as Tony Stark being turned into a woman. The board had been thrilled, though DeFalco had seemed somewhat disappointed during his meeting with Tony this morning when he'd walked into Tony's office to find a man sitting behind the desk instead of a reasonably attractive woman. Once Tony had begun showing him the results from the final stages of implementation at the geothermal energy plant, however, the Department of Energy representative had perked back up again. And when Tony had handed him the balance sheet of cost expenditures versus energy output, he'd positively beamed.

It was good to know that he hadn't lost his touch.

Tony surveyed the array of scattered armor components, already seeing in his head the way they would fit together, how the rerouted power input for the gauntlets would work. It had taken three hours to get the suit apart like this, and would take at least four more to put it back together, but he had time, or rather, after nearly forty-eight hours of being male again, he'd finally been able to stand it no longer and made time. He'd turned off his cell phone and Avengers communicator, told Pepper not to let anyone or anything in, and locked the door.

He felt naked when his armor wasn't working properly. He wouldn't have waited this long to get to work on it if he'd had a choice.

First there had been all the tests Hank, Don, and Strange had wanted to do, and then he had needed to speak to the board, and then the press, and then he'd had to look over the legal paperwork for one of the patent cases he was still fighting against SHIELD, and the lawsuit against the investor who had pulled his financial support from a project when Tony had been turned into a woman, which was thankfully being settled out of court. He could just imagine the judge's face otherwise, when Tony walked in, very obviously male, and gave his deposition.

"But you are not a woman now, Mr. Stark," he or she would say, and Tony would, what? Shrug, and say, "I got better?" He could imagine how well that would have gone over.

And the final phase of testing on the geothermal energy project had just been completed yesterday, and...

What with one thing and another, he hadn't even made it back to the Mansion. He'd slept on a cot in his workroom last night, the way he'd used to whenever he didn't have a date.

Pepper had had a few things to say about that.

"I am not avoiding Steve," Tony announced aloud to the repulsor coil in his hand. "I'm just busy."

He was probably doing Steve a favor by staying here, intentional or not. He'd stopped sleeping in his own room at the mansion several weeks ago, after he'd proposed to Steve. Their relationship had been common knowledge by then, and sneaking back into his own room at night had seemed silly.

Steve would have insisted on Tony still sleeping in his bed, on not changing anything they did just because circumstances had changed. He would probably have insisted on going ahead with the wedding, as well, if there had been a snowball's chance in hell that the state would have let them.

And Tony wouldn't have been able to say no. He suspected it was beyond mortal power to refuse Steve when he looked you in the eye and asked you to go to bed with him (he said it that way, too, "Go to bed with me," because he was adorably old fashioned and incapable actually saying things like, "Tony, I want you to let me fuck you into the mattress.").

And taking Steve up on the offer, pretending nothing had changed, would have been fair to Steve. Steve loved him, he knew, but he hadn't been interested in starting a relationship until Tony had been female. He hadn't been attracted to Tony in a male body -- it had been Tony's temporary, female body that Steve had wanted, that Steve had thought was beautiful, desirable.

All the love in the world couldn't make you enjoy sex that went against your natural orientation, could it?

It had always been the person, for him, whenever it had been serious, not the body they came in. Whitney's scarred face hadn't made a difference to him, and Bethany's strength and Indres' seductive smiles would have been just as irresistible if they had been men. Rhodey's piloting skills and ability to hold his own against Tony in a race or an argument and Steve's passion and confidence and overwhelming physical presence would have been just as sexy in a woman.

It didn't work that way for most people, though. It was important for most people that their partner have the right equipment, whether it be the male or the female kind.

And Tony didn't, not any longer.

If someone had asked him, three days ago, if he would allow Strange and Wanda to change him back if the price for it was losing Steve, he would have told them no.

He had the torso of the armor and one repulsor gauntlet back together when there was a knock on the door.

Tony ignored it, not looking up. The gauntlet was held together by a myriad of tiny screws, among other things, and if any one of them was loose, the structural integrity was compromised.

The more recent versions of the armor were more powerful and offered more protection, but there were times when he missed the flexible metal he'd used in the earlier designs. The arms and legs of the armor had been cast in single pieces then, with no need for joints, and it had simplified the construction considerably. It had also made the suit lighter, which meant that it had required less power to operate.

He was debating the merits of re-introducing fleximetal into the armor's knee and elbow joints when the knocking was repeated.

"Pepper, what did I tell you?" he called out.

"Not to let me in." Steve's voice.

Damnit. He'd been hoping to postpone this conversation a little while longer.

Tony input the code to unseal the door and immediately found himself face to face with Steve. At least he was face to face with him, and not nose-to-chest anymore. This was going to be hard enough without Steve having that psychological advantage.

"I suspected that you were avoiding me, but I didn't think you'd actually tell Pepper not to let me in." Steve sounded slightly hurt.

"I told her not to let anyone in," Tony corrected, wincing inwardly. He hadn't thought about how it would sound to Steve if he showed up and found himself barred from entering Tony's workroom. "I wanted to finish this without interruptions."

"Pepper says you slept here last night."

"I was busy. It was so late by the time I finished everything that it was easier just to stay here. The geothermal plant's official opening is next week," he added.

"You are coming home tonight, though?" Steve sounded... hopeful? Plaintive?

"I need to finish this first," he evaded.

Steve folded his arms and leaned against the wall, to all appearances settling in to stay. "I'll wait."

"It could take a long time," Tony warned.

"I don't mind."

He was being a coward, Tony decided. He needed to deal with this now -- the longer he dragged it out, the more painful it would be for both of them.

He had been prepared for this once. He'd let himself take his relationship with Steve for granted once he'd given up hope of being changed back.

"Steve, about..." Tony took a deep breath, bracing himself inwardly. "About the marriage. I don't consider any promises made binding anymore, everything's changed."

"What do you mean, not binding?" Steve demanded, and Tony had to look away from the expression on his face. He was doing this for Steve's own good, he reminded himself, giving him a graceful out now, without the humiliation of trying to make it work and failing. "Nothing's changed!"

"You agreed to marry me when we thought there was no chance of my changing back anymore. When we both assumed that I was stuck as a woman."

Steve nodded slowly, misery in his eyes. "And now that you're back to normal, you don't-"

"I'll understand if you can't be together with me anymore," Tony blurted out. "Now that I'm a man again. I'm not going to force you to try and have sex with me like this, not if you don't-- I know you love me, but if you're not comfortable with--"

"Wait," Steve interrupted, "are you breaking things off with me, or are you afraid I want to break things off with you because you think I'm afraid to out myself?"

"I know you don't care what other people think. You fell in love with a woman, not a man. You didn't sign up for--"

"I fell in love with you," Steve snapped. "I don't care what gender you are. If I didn't care that you'd been changed into a woman, why would it stop me that you'd been changed back?"

"Because you're not attracted to men?"

"What do you mean, I'm not attracted to men? I've been sleeping with you for months!"

"While I was a woman!"

"Do you think I cared about that? I admit, it never occurred to me that I'd have a chance with you before, but I didn't know you liked men until I heard about you and Hank, or that you'd ever thought of me that way, until you told me after that party." He stepped forward and took Tony by the arms, heedless of the screwdriver Tony was still holding. "Do you want me to prove it to you? Fine. I'll prove it to you."

He brought his mouth down on Tony's hard, his tongue demanding entry, his fingers digging into Tony's arms.

Tony was too surprised to push him away; he fell into the kiss just as he always had.

It felt no different. Not forced or hesitant. Steve wasn't holding anything back, was kissing Tony with as much enthusiasm as he ever had. He released Tony's arms, one hand suddenly flat against Tony's back and the other sliding into the back pocket of his jeans, pulling Tony's body against his. "You didn't come home last night," he said into the side of Tony's throat, pressing an open-mouthed kiss against the pulse point under Tony's jaw. "I've wanted to get my hands on you like this for two days now." The words vibrated across his skin, and Tony could feel the hard length of Steve through both their clothing, the evidence of Steve's arousal sending all of Tony's good intentions out the window. Screw being noble, he decided, letting the screwdriver clatter to the floor and sliding his hands down to Steve's impossible perfect ass, grinding his own erection into Steve's. No one should be expected to be noble under these circumstances.

"The floor is covered with my armor," Tony gasped, breaking the next kiss for a moment in order to say it. "We can't do this here." Actually, he realized, the door had a lock that only he could open and he'd told Pepper not to let anyone else into his office. She wouldn't have let Steve in if she hadn't decided that it would be good for Tony to talk to him.

Pepper was a very smart woman, and he'd have to thank her later.

"There's a cot over in the corner," he said. "It's kind of small, but-"

Steve pulled away from him, disentangling himself from Tony's arms and taking a step back. "This is the first time I'll be sleeping with you in this body," he said, shaking his head. "Your own body. Not that the other one wasn't yours, but-- This time, we're going to do things right. The classy way that involves an actual bed instead of gym mats or your laboratory floor."

The armor, Tony decided, could wait. "Sorry, Shellhead," he murmured to the half-completed pile of parts on the workbench and floor. "I'm afraid you come in second this time."

"I don't talk to my shield, you know."

"No," Tony said, "but you sleep with it."

"Keeping it next to my bed is not sleeping with it." He reached out and grabbed Tony by the wrist, pulling him toward the door that led back out into his office. "Come on," he said. "And don't you dare offer to let me back out of this one more time. We are getting married in three weeks come hell or high water. If Chthon couldn't stop us, then backwards and intolerant state laws sure as hell won't. We can go to Massachusetts."

Tony laughed, and let Steve drag him out of the room.

The End