Chapter Text
So.
Finding a super secret spy solider.
Tony would use the classic comparison of a needle in a haystack, except he actually had a few reasonable ways to go about that. Use a metal detector. Or a strong magnet. Or failing that, set the entire haystack on fire; the ashes would be much easier to sift through than an entire tower of dried grass.
Unfortunately, you can’t really burn the whole world just to find one man.
“But maybe we could torch HYDRA?” Tony pondered aloud as he paced back and forth across the circular hologram plinth in the centre of the workshop, his wife leaning on the bars surrounding the portal pad behind him. “Do we have time to purge SHIELD of Nazis before the next big thing happens?”
“Depends on what we think might happen with that mess now,” Pepper gestured in the direction of the patch of hologram labelled invasion of New York. “I mean, Loki’s currently upstairs reading this week’s Hello Magazine to Morgan and Lila…”
“Hnnnnng,” he groaned melodramatically, flapping his arms. “Why did I have to give into my moral conscious and interfere? Fuck knows who, if anyone will invade now. Or when. Or where.”
“Thanos will still want the cube so he can get the blue stone out of it,” Pepper hummed consideringly. “So either he’ll send someone else or he’ll show up for it himself at some point.”
“God, I’ll go insane if I start pondering all the possibilities,” Tony sighed as he scrubbed one hand backwards through his hair. “Alright, let’s… For the sake of my sanity, let’s just assume that Thanos will still be clear across the universe three years from now and so will have to use the Tesseract to generate a portal again in order to get here. Which means he’ll probably send someone else in his stead. Maybe telekinetic squid man? Or is Nebula still evil at this point? Did Nebula ever tell you when she stopped being evil?”
“When did she and Rhodey time travel to when they went to get the… whichever stone it was they were assigned?”
“Power. And uh, um… let me just…”
Turning on his heel, Tony flicked his hands through the hologram displaying the other end of their reconstructed timeline, zooming in on the Gordian knot that represented the “time heist” in 2023. Rather than trying to loop back along the rest of the timeline, Tony had had JARVIS design it so that the central knot shape could be opened up to display six tendrils that snaked outwards, one for each of the stones and what he knew of their retrieval quests.
“2014,” Tony read off of the purple line. “Why? What does that-? Oh I see! You reckon that’s when evil-alternate Nebula who started the big final killed-me-to-death battle came from?”
“That’s what I was told afterwards,” Pepper confirmed. “So she could be the one Thanos sends through to start the invasion.”
“Looks like. Although–” He cut himself off. “Ugh, we’ve gotten massively sidetracked. Forget the who, the when is more important right now and that’s likely still the summer of 2012. Approximately. Ish,” he made a so-so hand gesture. “Which means we have just shy of three years of relative quiet to play with.”
“I say we do it then. We need to find Barnes as soon as possible, so let’s take down HYDRA.”
“Wunderbar,” Tony sighed, mussing his hair again. “Alright, where’s my Rhodey? And I need to talk to Steve as well. And probably Nat. And– you know what, let’s find Rhodey first and then organise a full team meeting.”
As it turned out, Rhodey was in one of the open-fronted study rooms carved out along the edges of the library in Kamar-Taj. Sitting at a leather-topped desk, he was surrounded by a stack of open dusty books and unravelled rolls of parchment. He also had an engraved fountain pen tucked behind one ear, blue ink stains all over his fingers, and his newest pair of clear-lens SMART glasses over his eyes.
“Guuurl I have been looking everywhere for you!” Tony greeted his best-mate enthusiastically. “Well,” he then corrected himself. “I looked in a couple of places and then finally remembered that I am a smart man and that I could just ask JARVIS.”
“Oh hey dude,” Rhodey greeted him back, blinking as he dropped out of what had obviously been a state of intense concentration.
“Listen yeah,” Tony barrelled onwards immediately. “Pepper and I have just had a little pow-pow, a constructive conflab you might say. On the SHIELD-HYDRA issue. We’re thinking it’s arson time, see? So there’s some things we need to get a move on with, like now.”
“Oh, I’ve been working on that too, sort of,” Rhodey double blinked again. “I figured that we’d have a bit of time now, as SMART told me the next major incident on your timeline is–”
“Alien invasion, yeah,” Tony interrupted him. “Which might not happen any more, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.”
“Right, because Loki–”
“Yeah,” Tony said over him again. “Because Loki. Exactly.”
“Well,” Rhodey smiled at him bemusedly. “I presumed that since nothing big is set to happen, you’d probably want to deal with the HYDRA issue. But then there’s also the Rescue Barnes issue, and he is HYDRA right now, so…”
“So?”
“So I figured it made sense to get Barnes out of Hydra before you and Steve start pulverising them. Or he might go completely to ground and you don’t have an infinite amount of time to dig him out again.”
“Right, except a big reason why I want to start throwing metaphorical Molotov cocktails now is that he’s already completely underground and I can’t think of anything else that’ll rattle him enough to surface him. Plus you know, the fewer connections and strongholds HYDRA has, the fewer places they have to re-hide Mr Frosty Soldier. And trust me, right now they have a lot of hidey holes.”
“Except you’re forgetting the obvious,” Rhodey grinned at him, tone teasing.
This time, it was Tony who blinked.
Rhodey’s grin grew wider.
“You’re forgetting,” he enunciated carefully with obvious glee, “that we’re sorcerers now.”
Tony blinked blankly again.
“Wait,” he then blurted, realisation crashing into him as he finally took note of which books and scrolls Rhodey had spread out before him. Namely, those horrible tomes of geometry and mathematical sigil adjustments. “That’s fucking genius! You beautiful, beautiful man! I could kiss you right now!”
“Go on then,” Rhodey smirked smugly as he patted his cheek in invitation.
Tony laughed and made his way around the table to do just that.
“I didn’t want to start the calculations completely from scratch,” Rhodey then started explaining. “So I scoured the shelves for anything relating to tracking spells first. I found a couple which look reasonable, but they both have a high energy cost and they need something from the target referred to as “essence of the being’s soul”. From context, I think that’s old-timey speak for “you need a DNA sample” but hell if I know for sure.”
“Which books? Show me the passages?”
“First one’s on that tablet there. No, the one in ancient Sumerian with the chipped corner. And you’ll need that Sanskrit scroll to understand its sigil system.”
“Ea-nāṣir has a lot to answer for,” Tony mumbled under his breath as he pulled out a chair and began to squint at the cuneiform characters. “And so does Wong. Oh Tony, you could totally learn sorcery Tony! I conveniently won’t mention all the dead languages you’ll have to learn to read Tony!”
“Oh Rhodey, come and learn sorcery with me Rhodey!” his best mate started to fondly mock. “I, hypocrite much?”
“Shush you”
“Shush yourself!” Rhodey retorted inanely. “Now hurry up and read the ancient cursed tablet. Because once you’ve agonised your way through that, you should also look at Kuangyin’s treatise on the soul, and then refresh your memory of celestial lunar realm cycles.”
“Oh, lunar realm because of the–”
“Yeah, the energy cost problem. But seriously. Reading. The faster you catch up to me, the faster you can start checking my maths.”
“Oh brilliant,” Tony sighed mock-scathingly. “More maths.”