It's important to remember that I had no idea what happened in the second Thor movie. It was named like, "Dark World" there were, svartalves or something? It didn't really matter. I had no idea what was coming in the next few days but I had learned, rather painfully, that the plots of the movies were pretty short in day terms. This movie could be different, but I'd put the Defense Team on scramble and the vanilla avengers who might be useful, Bruce and Tina, were on standby in orbit and would be for the next week. I had still not cracked the self-assembling suits for the Defense Team so I had resigned myself to losing tens of thousands of dollars in government money and set them up with the singularity bombs.

I was doing all my managing from Sokovia, which I figured probably didn't have anything to do with this plot. If it doesn't have anything to do with the plot, it can't bother you. But there's only so much you can do to prepare for, "idk, could be real bad, could be nothing." For all I knew, everything important would happen in Asgard. I really knew nothing about that plot.

So when I was sitting at my desk in Sokovia, waiting for the news of what might or might not happen and I got a phone call from SWORD I picked up.

"What's up?" I said, propping up a can of Dr. Pepper.

"Distortions of reality are getting worse in Greenwich over the Old Navy College, sir."

"How worse are we talking about?"

"There are giant floating portals in the sky, looks like they go to other worlds."

"Are they dropping bombs out of the sky?'

"No."

"Have you deployed the defense team?"

"Well, no."

You see, I am a man of stature now, unable to say witty things like, 'well golly, what do we have them for then?' "Why not?"

"We wanted to assess the situation for risk."

"There are gaping holes in the sky, go ahead and assume the Defense Team needs to be there. Tell them to have reversion teleportation activated if they need it and to keep an eye out for forming beams, falling bombs, and so forth."

"Yes sir."

—

Steve and the defense team dropped in on the roof of the Old Navy college, an august building that for all Steve knew was older than the United States. "You see anything?" Steve said into his communicator to the rest of the team. A segment of U.S. and British forces had dropped in ahead, numbering about twenty four, a full contingent.

"Giant portals?" "Dirt floating upward?" "A wave in the water like a ship"

"Wave in the water like a ship?"

"Sailing down the middle, straight toward the park grass of the college court," the man said, one of the British agents. The crowd had seen it now too, they were all evacuating and the cloak was coming off the ship. It was a massive black T shape and it had an aura of menace to

"Alien ship, probably hostile. Everyone keep your finger on the reversion button in case it decides to go boom." The ship was slowing to a halt.

"Cap, I don't like this. If it were friendly, it would've communicated," Natasha said over the comms.

"Can't risk starting a war we can't win, hold off on actions but keep your singularity bombs and your reversions ready." Steve said, climbing onto the edge of the roof and landing in the center of the building.

"Cap, what're you doing?" Ward asked, his voice worried.

"My job. Well, my original job. Well, my SWORD job." And then Steve leaped into the middle of the field in front of the ship, rolling through the grass and dirt and coming up clean. All that practice with Ward was paying off.

A moment later, Ward joined him on the ground, "Can't let you be this stupid alone," Ward said. "It would embarrass us in front of the British." The suit's helmet covered his expression, but Steve knew he was smiling. Jerk.

Steve clapped Ward on the shoulder, "Thank you." And he meant it. He wasn't scared of guns and thugs anymore, but this could be anything. Literally anything. There was a gap in the ship and down it was coming an elevator that was backlit with red. What was it with bad guys and red? No, he told himself, they might not be bad guys. Steve did his best to look non-threatening. Hopefully the red, white, and blue get up helped in that regard.

Suddenly, Steve saw Thor, landing on the ground of the yard. "Captain," he said. Steve looked at him and smiled. He probably couldn't see the smile.

"Thor, it's good to see you. These friends of yours?"

"Unfortunately not. They are the enemies of all life."

"Everybody get that, Thor says the enemy of all life. Hit it with some singularity bombs."

"Roger that," Barton said and they began dropping the bombs. Or in Barton's case, launching with his bow. But when they went off, they didn't scrape the metal of the ship, but flew upward and out, eventually detonating near or above the top of the ship. The ship itself received only a small amount of ripping from the distortion of the bombs.

"We must distract them while Jane activates Dr. Selvig's scepters."

"Alright," Cap said, relaying the information to his team. "Thor, this is my friend, Ward, you'll find almost two dozen other agents spread out over the buildings here in similar black and white getups. You're the expert at the moment, we're ready to take our cues from you."

The doors of the elevator opened and footpath extended for the leader. A tall man with dark skin and white hair, a dark burn mark across his face and pointed ears. Behind him trooped a squad of faceless goons in white masks with the same sharp ears.

"You've come so far Asgardian, but death will come for you and your friends regardless."

"I will handle Malakith, the chatty one with the burn. If your men can handle the rest, we should be in good states."

Steve nodded and started calibrating his teleportation, "Primary hostile is Thor's, everybody else, let's offer our visitors a surprise from the Quantum Realm."

Steve teleported across the field and behind Malakith, shoving down the distortion from the intermediary matter and shoving his shield into the face of one of the masked men. The man staggered back but not down and Steve knew he wasn't in Kansas any more. Ward appeared behind the man and twisted his head until the man stopped moving, choking on his own breath. "Gramps, come on!"

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"Listen kid," Steve said, leaping towards another one of the maskless men that were starting to surround him. His reversion marker was still on. "These guys are tougher than normal humans."

"When they were fighting Thor, I just assumed," he tossed a singularity grenade into the middle of the crowd and they didn't react fast enough before it blew up and swallowed three of them. But there were still about two dozen.

"Have the others not been practicing their teleportation targeting?" Steve asked as one of the men missed him with a red blaster.

"They do seem to be shockingly lax," Ward said. One of the men lunged at him and Steve rammed him with a shoulder and knocked him to the ground. Then he had to knock what looked like some kind of grenade loose into the crowd of approaching attackers. The grenade went off without a hitch, turning into a black hole not entirely dissimilar to the singularity grenade, and took out another two men. They were clearing this honor guard remarkably quickly.

Natasha appeared and started blasting away but he and Ward were really cornered now. The rounds from her guns weren't having a ton of effect unless they bit flesh first and there weren't a lot of instances of that. They were decently armored in a kind of magical chainmail, from what Steve could tell. She was also having to be careful not to hit him or Ward - She always carried armored piercing rounds and while they could survive most bullet wounds, dropping into a regenerative coma was not an ideal situation.

Barton was shooting from a comfortable distance and all Steve could think was that he should've spent a decade mastering the bow to the same effect. One of the men lunged at him and Steve was too distracted, he hit the ground. Steve thought of Peggy as the alien raised his hand to shove it into his chest, which was a smart attack on the merits again people with Extremis, and then a blazing hand went through the man's torso and he toppled off him.

"You fried the glove, they're not gonna like that you fried the glove."

"He really needs to figure out how to take those things off without ruing the whole damn suit," Ward said, shoving a fiery hand into the throat of another one of the masked men. The honor guard was really thinning out now and the other troops had teleported in. They were outmatched, fundamentally, by the super soldiers. Ward stuck a burning hand into another man and pulled it out.

"Looks like we're winning this thing," Natasha said, finally reaching their side.

"It's not proving very difficult," Steve admitted, kicking the head of one of the men in a new kick flip he had learned. Steve didn't fight for fun, but it was fun, especially when the opponent was a challenge.

"Uh, guys," Barton said over the communicator, "You all need to clear out, primary is aiming his dark menacing energy tentacle things at you."

The rest of the Defense Team hit their reversions and went back to base camp. They had so many doses in these things they could come back in ten seconds if Steve gave the order. But Steve couldn't teleport, because Ward couldn't teleport, and he wasn't leaving Ward behind.

"Teleport damn it!" Ward shouted as they began to leap out of the way of the dark energy.

"Can't! Let!" He said as they landed on their feet and started running away from the last of the honor guard, "You do something!"

"Dodge left!" Ward shouted and Steve obeyed without thinking, just barely dodging a bolt from the laser blasters of the honor guard as Ward threw a singularity grenade into the proximity of what remained of the aliens.

"This stupid!" Steve said, grabbing a singularity grenade and tossing it into the crowd. "Alone!"

They peeled around behind a building and took a moment to breathe where they could catch someone who cornered with a grenade. Even for a super soldier, that had been a hard sprint. But the warmth of Extremis was already clearing the exhaustion from Steve's body. "Can't let you do something this stupid alone," Steve said.

"You're a gem," Ward said with sarcasm in his voice. But Steve knew he meant it, in his own prickly way.

Steve paused, "Was that all of them?"

"Could be, I lost count in the middle there."

"There were like two dozen at most, don't they teach you how to count to twenty four anymore?"

"Do you know?"

"No, I lost count in the middle," Steve said with a smirk.

"Cap, should we return to location?" Natasha said. "Monitor says your alive."

"Ah, sorry, uh, converge back around my location. There's a building to my right, I'll start tagging you places."

Steve started sending tagged locations to each of the rest of the team and they started appearing. "Everybody intact?" Steve asked, as Natasha appeared.

"All in tact," Natasha said. "Barton cleared too. You need to send another tag."

Steve did so without complaint. He had a lot of free time for this sort of practice. "Alright, Natasha, clear the corner?"

Natasha nodded and advanced to the corner, peering around it with her gun in front of her, "All clear. Looks like they're down or dead. Some sort of black whirlpool the middle of the field. Might be where Malakith is, it looks like the tendrils." Natasha said, ducking back in

"Alright," Steve said, "We pull around the corner, we lob some grenades, we see if it hits, if not, we see if it attacks us."

But when he and the others rounded the corner, only Thor was there, laying on the ground as the building sized space ship started to fall toward him. Jane Foster, Thor's girlfriend and the reason they'd been on high alert, was trying to drag him but Thor's a big man - Alien - Whatever he was, he was very fit. Without thinking, Steve had crossed the field toward them and grabbed Jane under one arm and Thor under the other and started hauling out of the fall path. But once he made it to the other side of the courtyard, he saw that the ship had gone missing.

It had been a wild fifteen minutes.