A slight eyebrow-raise. Gamora held the rest of it behind her face — assassins being, as a profession, reliable about that particular skill — and took her first step toward the alien skyline.
Earth. New York.
Having deposited his newly-empowered passenger on the far side of the galaxy, Jordan Instant-Transmissioned home.
The streets of 2012 Manhattan were still a warzone — Chitauri wreckage everywhere, smoke and pulverized concrete layered halfway up the skyline. On the top floor of Stark Tower, however, the original Avengers were already assembled, and Loki was laid out on a stretcher, shivering.
Two back-to-back Hulk-tier impacts — one courtesy of a certain Blue Beast in passing — had done things even a Frost Giant royal's physiology was not designed to absorb. The God of Mischief was, mercifully, no longer in any condition to cause trouble.
2012 Thor, sick with worry over his brother, had no interest in sticking around to help tidy the battlefield. He summoned Heimdall, abandoned the Tesseract and rode the Bifrost back to Asgard with Loki over his shoulder for healing.
A short while after that, both cosmic artifacts — Loki's Scepter, and the Tesseract itself — were bagged up by arriving S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, who cleared the floor with practiced military efficiency.
Which was, of course, exactly the moment the main-timeline Tony and Steve had been patiently waiting for.
Service corridor, two floors down.
"Hey, buddy. Didn't you just say we were going to take a shower together?"
Tony Stark — tricked out in a field-agent uniform, his jawline not quite hidden behind tactical goggles — raised one eyebrow at the Hydra operative who was, even through those goggles, doing an extremely unsubtle full-body scan of him. "Why wait till after the mission? Let's ditch this run right now. Whaddya say?"
"Really?" The guy's eyes lit up. Force of habit still had him glance down at the reinforced case in his hand. "But Secretary Pierce personally detailed this — let me drop it off first, and then—"
They rounded a corner.
Tony decided, in the space of one step, that he had done enough method work for one afternoon.
The field-agent shirt peeled away. The iron man nanoparticle armor assembled itself out of his wrist in under a second. A gold-and-red gauntlet closed around the Hydra agent's throat, and by the time the moment was over, the bastard was unconscious on the linoleum and Tony was walking off with the Tesseract's case.
"Damn it. That was the most disgusting undercover I have ever run in my life, Cap." He tapped his earpiece aggressively. "And I've run some. You heard that, right? I don't want to swear. I was being sworn at, by the universe. He started it."
A patient tone returned through the earpiece.
"Tony. You mentioned that four times on the drive over."
"Cap—" Tony started, wounded.
"..."
Tony grinned, ignored the exhale of static, and jabbed the elevator button for the floor directly below.
Captain America's floor.
The elevator doors opened onto a full tactical squad of perfectly trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
More accurately: Hydra personnel, embedded inside S.H.I.E.L.D., running escort cover for the Loki's Scepter hand-off.
Only Brock Rumlow — the one with the most emotional discipline in the group — didn't flinch when he saw Steve. Everyone else froze for a telling half-second before screwing their game faces back into place.
"Hey, Cap." Rumlow stepped in beside him. Casual. Professional. "Weren't you supposed to be running the rescue on the ground?"
"I was, Rumlow." Steve nodded evenly. "Plans changed."
Silence settled between them. Several square-jawed professionals began — very quietly — letting their hands drift toward their holsters.
Steve marked each of those hands in his peripheral vision. Then, with the timing of a man who had been rehearsing this scene in his head for an embarrassing amount of the elevator ride, he leaned in toward Jasper Sitwell — the bald one with the case — and, warm and conspiratorial:
"Hail Hydra."
The Hydra agents: "..."
Which is how, courtesy of what could only be described as Oscar-caliber acting work, Captain America walked out of that elevator cradling the customized Loki's-Scepter transit case without having to fire a single shot.
Tony's private office, top floor.
Jordan had his feet up on Tony's desk. A glass of Tony's personal-reserve red in one hand. A small pop corn in the other. Mind Network piping the entire corridor-and-elevator comedy directly into his cortex in real time.
He was absolutely losing it.
"Oh, oh that's good." He slapped one thigh. "The Scepter? He just whispers it — ha — they just hand the thing over — the shame—"
He wiped his eyes on the back of one wrist and turned, without looking, toward the empty air to his left.
"Don't you agree? Greatest Sorcerer Supreme of all time."
The empty air to his left was no longer empty.
"..."
The Ancient One had, by her own internal count, been standing at his shoulder for roughly twenty seconds, silently watching the back of his head.
Jordan's flattery did, grudgingly, soften her expression a little. The young man's reading of the room — sensible, non-combative, already deferring — suggested he was at least not the species of cross-dimensional invader who opened every encounter with a battle stance. Her irritation eased from gravely serious down to merely mildly annoyed.
"A man with neither past nor future," she said, "should not be in this place."
"Oh, absolutely." Jordan sat up respectfully. "I'm just a passing war god of the Jo family. I'll be out of here on schedule, not one second over. Cross my heart."
"I am not speaking of this time period, young man. I am speaking of this multiverse."
Jordan nodded, solemnly. "Absolutely. I will be out on schedule. Not one second over."
The Ancient One's brow furrowed fractionally.
Ah. She recognized the species now. One of these.
The kind of young man who was going to smile warmly through every polite warning she was prepared to issue.
She had, she admitted internally, allowed her attention to slip during the Chitauri invasion. The anomalies piling up on her mandala readings had been considerable, and she had permitted herself to be distracted by the front-door crisis. It had not, in all honesty, occurred to her that something more troublesome than a Chitauri army might slip in through the back door while she was doing so.
It is absolutely not, she told herself firmly, because I was talking to that one scientist for far too long.
Right. Well.
Peace negotiations having concluded without result, the Sorcerer Supreme decided it was time to help her uninvited guest develop a more accurate understanding of his own position in the universe.
Magic condensed around her open right palm. Impressive in volume by any ordinary metric. She drove the strike squarely into the center of Jordan's chest.
Jordan looked back down at her, mildly — with what could only be described, at that range, as a kind expression.
Somewhere inside her, the Sorcerer Supreme experienced a brief, genuine flash of regret for having already handed the Time Stone off to that rather charismatic middle-aged doctor.
Half a second earlier, internally:
Jordan had spent the ride back from Vormir walking the inside of the Soul Stone. The first effect — Soul Energy — was, he had concluded, obscenely practical. Infinite soul-tier energy, so long as the user's body could tolerate drawing on it. Functionally equivalent to opening a permanent dimensional supply line straight into his core.
Conveniently, Jordan happened to be exactly the kind of ruthless individual who would casually wield an Infinity Stone bare-handed.
He had siphoned a clean wave of soul energy into his own reserves on the way over. Result: the blue-energy spectrum in his star-core inventory had added a full category, and his soul-tier defensive rating had climbed to a figure he had never before seen on a personal readout.
As the saying went:
Only an Infinity Stone can counter an Infinity Stone.
The Ancient One — having personally handed the Time Stone off to a certain charismatic middle-aged doctor earlier in the afternoon — was, right now, operating at unaugmented Sorcerer Supreme baseline. Immense by any ordinary scale. Backed by the dimensional credit lines of a hundred named entities. But without an Infinity Stone actively propping her output.
Which meant that her palm strike, however impressive by normal sorcery metrics, registered against Jordan's soul-tier defenses as the cosmic-scale equivalent of—
— a polite knock.
Purity gap's just too wide, Jordan thought, not without sympathy. No way this cracks through.
However.
On reflection: the woman was the current, reigning Sorcerer Supreme of this particular space-time. Souring the relationship over one palm-strike she had every right to be issuing would be, he had to concede, shortsighted.
All of them, after all, on the hero side of things.
After an almost-ten-second beat that would not have been there if he'd actually been hit, Jordan's body tilted slowly backward — froze in mid-air, no magical suspension holding it, no gravity engaging — and a handsome figure in a vintage purple suit slid gracefully out through the front of his chest.
A very convincing representation of a freshly ejected soul.
F-boy, being non-material in presentation, made for an excellent stand-in for exactly this sort of thing.
F-boy, internal, aside: Hey, boss. Think my performance is coming across?