"Tony!" Andromeda said enthusiastically as I pulled open the door for Pepper and Tony. She gave him a hug, as I smiled politely at them both. Pepper was dressed in comfortable middle class evening wear and Tony was in a nice t-shirt.

"Drama, good to see you," Tony said after a moment of shock before moving to a much cooler voice, "Michael."

"Tony," I said with a nod of my head. "Ms. Potts."

"Please, call me Pepper," Pepper said, extending a hand for me to shake. I took it and smiled. She seemed friendly enough, but her response to Andromeda was significantly less muted. "Andromeda! It's good to meet you in person, I'm sure you get this a lot, but we're so grateful for your service."

Andromeda grinned modestly and waved her hand, "I think anyone would've done the same in my position." Andromeda did not think that, but she was a good liar.

"Come on in," I said, gesturing them inside. Just like that, the two smartest men in the world were inside my sleek modern house. I knew it was tiny compared to Tony and the Pride's houses but it was still large enough for me and Andromeda, plans for children weren't immediate, so I didn't let it bother me.

We walked to the kitchen, Pepper enthusing over the house with Andromeda and admiring the various paintings of historical events. We got into the kitchen and Tony said, "Oh, look slave labor," as I migrated over to the stove.

"Corvee labor, actually," I said lazily as I took a long whiff of the food. "More like taxes than slavery." Of course, people hated corvee labor, it was terrible, it was why Solomon's son was overthrown, but it was an easy way to score points against Tony. It wasn't like he was mistaking my painting of the pyramids for an enthusiasm for slavery.

"Big fan of taxes?" Tony said, pulling up next to me and grabbing a pair of tongs and snapping them open and shut.

"Tony…" Pepper said, but I made a calming gesture.

"Off the record, I actually do. A beautiful way for all of us to contribute to the well-being of our fellow citizens and fellow human beings." I meant it, too.

Tony laughed at that and snapped the tongs again before putting them back down. "So if the government raised our tax rates to ninety five percent?"

"Well, they did it to hit Rockefeller, why not us?" I said, stirring the pot both literally and figuratively.

"Maybe I don't trust them to spend it," Tony said, putting down the tongs. I couldn't tell if this was his real opinion or he was just looking for a fight.

"I've learned an important lesson about trusting myself recently," I said, sliding easily toward what I thought might be the real point of this conversation.

Tony looked at me and paused as if he had just said something very stupid. "Right," he said after a moment. "It's a good thing you had that Tetra-whatever protocol. Added one to the suits after I saw that."

Did I just succeed at making Tony Stark feel bad? I guess whatever bothered him wasn't that I was mind controlled. Or maybe it was? Was I overcomplicating this? Lord, what if it was actually that stupid energy debate from nearly three years ago? Pepper seemed to take it as an opportunity to steer the conversation away from politics, "We were so disappointed that Rhodey had to cancel. He's got some big thing."

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"Yeah, would've been nice to get all the West Coast Avengers together under one roof," Tony said. Tina was coming soon.

Avengers was an interesting term in this timeline. Because SWORD retained most of the Supersoldiers as "the defense team" after the attack, the news tended to refer to "the avengers and the defense team" even though the defense team was a part of the Avengers. So when people referred to "the avengers" they usually meant Ms. Wizard, Hornet, Rhodey, Captain America, Hulk, and Thor, even though from a legal perspective the Defense Team was also part of the Avengers initiative. In this context, it meant the people who had involved in the combat defeat of Loki. An uneven category that we were using to get Tony over to our house as an excuse.

"I've gotta ask, Tony, why aren't you in the suit?" I had been wondering for three years, but it wasn't like I had access to the guy till now.

Tony waved the tongs, "I do look good in one. I did it for a little while, but then I had a health scare. Its all sorted, but it was a chance for me to focus on the things that were most important to me." He looked over at Pepper and I resisted the urge to slam the boiling pot into my head until my brain joined the stew.

It was shockingly hard not to scream. Of course. That stupid movie and its weird plot. That's what the element in the fair was for. It burned cleaner than Palladium did under the Arc reactor. And Pepper never liked Tony being Iron Man but he hadn't gotten together with her in the first movie because he'd forgotten her on the roof. By the time of Ivan's attack, it didn't matter, but if it had been making him sick, he'd have told his girlfriend, and if he had told his girlfriend, Tony would've never gotten into it in the first place. And then Ivan hadn't attacked him because he wasn't a massive locus of attention and I'd dealt with his father's medical bills, so there was never a personal reason to be Iron Man.

"Uh, earth to Mike," Andromeda said, "Do you want me to go get that?"

"Yeah, please do." How on earth was I going to explain freezing up at a man talking the most important things? I guess Tina and Robert had made it.

"Well done," Tony said as I stared after her.

"Yeah, I guess I got caught up thinking about our wedding being crashed. I don't know, I'm incredibly proud of the work Andromeda does. She's not just a hero, she's my hero."

Pepper said "Aw" as Tony said, "She can't hear you, you know." Pepper shot Tony a glare.

Tina and Robert came in. Tina hadn't taken the serum yet, she wasn't sure of the effects on magical proclivity but like half of my social circle at this point, Robert had. I just got used to all my friends being Tall and Buff at a certain point.

"Tina," I said happily and waved to Robert.

"Mike, thank you for having us." Tina said warmly. Our relationship hadn't exactly been frosty before the Burning of the Capital - I had been a step up from Jonah and I didn't interfere too much. The relationship was much better since I had her kids hustled out of the wedding before myself and she'd fought Selvig alongside Andromeda. We'd been working together more closely since then. It turned out she really was a wizard, which was just ugh frustrating. "Tony, it's good to see you again."

"Tina, it's so good to see you again," Pepper said. Again? I hadn't known about any again. Oh, whatever, who cared. They were people, not pets. It wasn't like she knew anything that could ruin me. "How's work?"

"Fascinating," Tina said as I took the pot off the stove. "We're working on a full immersion digital experience. Touch, taste, sight."

What we were really working on was immortality, but the immersion digital experience was a core part of it. Once we could make stable environments for human minds, we could use even the retro-grade upload process of Hydra to achieve true immortality for all mankind. And the immersion digital system would also let us engage in all kinds of useful training exercises or even to make bad tasting food taste good.

"Have you heard from Selvig?" Tony asked as Pepper carried the salad he had abducted the tongs from to the dining table.

"He's… adapting to Asgard alright. But we've exchanged our data and neither Mike or I can figure out how to revert him to his normal form." I felt a weird twinge of guilt about that. It didn't even make sense. I felt worse about Selvig's new big blue form than I did about all the people who had died. But those people weren't Main Characters to my brain, so I guess that was part of my problem.

We followed Pepper into the dining room and sat down around the table to eat when something on Tony buzzed. "Oh, it's Rhodey. He says, uh, 'hey, check out the news.' Trent, where's your TV?"

Why did no one in this world just communicate what was on the TV? It was the only reason why I had a TV. It was a cultural rule, no Spoilers for Real Life. "Come on," I said, jerking my head towards the living room and verbally turning it on.

"AIM CEO Aldrich Killian was arrested last night by the Defense Team of S.W.O.R.D. for the so-called Mandarin bombings," oh, yeah, that was him. I'd wait and see how to get the formula from A.I.M. If I was lucky, S.W.O.R.D would just have it but you could never be too sure. I had some money set aside to purchase his patent rights or something. "In the process of coming to a deal with prosecutors, he has named many co-conspirators. Foremost among those conspirators was the Vice President of the United States, Joseph Rodriguez. Patriot, also known as Colonel James Rhodes, has just now escorted him out of his Washington residence."

Wait. A.I.M. had been involved in a conspiracy with the Vice President of the United States?