2.4. Avengers Assemble
We open in the Joint Dark Energy Mission Facility. Clint Barton is trying to persuade his on-again-off-again (currently on-again) girlfriend Bobbi Morse that she should cover his guard shift that night because Tony Stark had invited him out on the town with him, Bruce Banner, and Steve Rogers, and “how many times am I going to get the chance to get rat-assed with Captain America?”
Bobbi reluctantly agrees, but makes him promise he’ll do the same for her, and reminds him that she’s only covering one shift. He still needs to be sober enough to work tomorrow.
Hard cut to a bar. Clint and Tony, clearly drunk, are singing karaoke extremely badly, while Bruce (who’s drinking water) and Steve (who can’t get drunk) do their best to have a civilised conversation.
Back at the facility, an evacuation is underway. Nick Fury and Maria Hill arrive and are briefed. For unknown reasons, the Tesseract has spontaneously started to generate constantly increasing levels of energy, and nothing Selvig or his team have done has been able to shut it down.
Fury sends Phil Coulson to speed up the evacuation and Hill to get the ‘phase two technology’ to a safe distance, while he descends into the bowels of the facility to where Selvig and his team are studying the Tesseract.
Fury starts to ask for Barton, then notices Bobbi assisting one of the scientists. He asks her what she’s doing, and she tells him about changing shifts with Barton and points out that staying on guard seems pointless when there won’t be anything to guard if they can’t get the Tesseract under control.
Fury seems concerned about Barton’s absence, suspicious that Tony, who is still insistent that he can see the future, knows something he’s not telling. He knows Tony and Clint are friends, and he’s worried that Tony has pulled Clint out because he knows they’re not going to get the Tesseract back under control.
He asks her if she’d seen anything suspicious, and she says no - if anyone has changed anything, it wasn’t on this end. When Fury asks what ‘this end’ means, she points out that Selvig’s team believe the Tesseract is a doorway to deep space, and doors open on both sides.
As they’re talking, the Tesseract activates, shooting a beam of energy that explodes into blue fire. When the smoke and fire have cleared, Loki is standing in the room, holding the sceptre.
He easily fights off the SHIELD agents who try to stop him. Only Bobbi poses any kind of challenge to him, but he gets her backed into a corner and presses the tip of his Sceptre to her chest, and her eyes slowly turn the same vivid unnatural blue as the sceptre.
Fury tries to leave with the Tesseract, but Loki has Bobbi shoot him. Loki uses the staff on Selvig and the other remaining SHIELD agents, and they leave with the Tesseract.
Fury barely makes it out of the facility before the residual Tesseract energy blows the building completely.
Hill pursues Loki, but they bring down a tunnel on top of her, and when Fury gets to a chopper, they shoot that down too and make their escape. Fury staggers out of the wreckage of the helicopter, bruised but alive, and tells Hill it’s time. He’s activating the Avengers protocol.
Coulson gets dispatched to collect Tony and Bruce and finds Clint and Steve passed out on couches in Tony’s living room. Clint has a tie tied around his head, because this is a movie, and otherwise the audience might not know he’d been drinking.
They arrive at the Helicarrier, where Natasha Romanoff is waiting for them. After Steve and Bruce have been introduced to her, she takes them inside for the briefing.
Fury tells them what they know and sets Tony and Bruce up in a lab. The idea is for Tony to write a programme to Bruce’s specification that they can feed through to any lab with a spectrometer SHIELD can access. They’re only a few minutes in when SHIELD’s facial recognition scans get a hit in Stuttgart.
Loki interrupts a gala, grabs one of the attendees and places a device over one of his eyes. A few miles away, Bobbi uses the corresponding device to trick a retinal scan, and get into a vault containing one of the few supplies of iridium.
As Bobbi and her men load up the iridium, Loki strolls out of the gala and into a large square, his suit shimmering into armour as he walks.
Loki creates doubles to pen in and corral the fleeing civilians, uses the sceptre to destroy the police cars that get close, and gives his big baby’s first fascism speech.
Tony’s out of practice fighting with an ally, and Steve’s never had to learn to anticipate the moves of someone who can fly,. They get in one another’s way as much as they do Loki’s, but Loki was never intending to walk away from this fight, and they still subdue him easily enough.
As they’re flying Loki back to the Hellicarrier, there’s a sudden unseasonal thunderstorm and Thor hits the plane like, if you’ll pardon the pun, a bolt of lightning.
He grabs Loki and flies, and Tony follows. Cap dives out after them, expecting to find a battle, but Thor recognises the armoured man who had assisted him in the battle against the Destroyer, and greets Tony as an old friend. Tony makes the introductions, and Steve is confused, but happy for Thor to come along, since he has the inside intel on Loki.
On the Helicarrier, Loki is placed in a cage designed to hold the Hulk, while Thor brings the Avengers up to speed. He knows that Loki has a Chitauri mother-ship, though he doesn’t know-how. Asgard has few dealings with galaxies outside the Nine Realms, but even they can’t live completely cut off. He knows the Chitauri by reputation, cybernetic soldiers who fight without fear or pain, controlled by the mother-ship hive mind. Thor believes he’s using the cube to create a portal for his army to reach Earth. The cube came into Asgardian hands during the reign of Buri, after the death of its creator. The Asgardians spent centuries studying its capabilities, so Loki is well aware of the possibilities it offers.
After the briefing, Tony and Bruce return to the lab, and Clint follows them. As soon as the door closes behind them, he confronts Tony, demanding to know why Tony hadn’t warned them what was coming since he claims to see the future. Tony tells him, not entirely untruthfully, that it couldn’t be avoided, but admits that in the future he saw, it had been Clint who was taken by Loki. He’d hoped that by switching Clint out for someone else, Loki would be robbed of his best asset. Clint retorts that they traded a sniper for someone with all his combat training and brilliant scientific mind as well.
Tony apologises and then can’t bear the awkwardness. He leaves Bruce and JARVIS to work on the algorithm and goes to ask Fury if he can join Natasha in interrogating Loki.
Steve is suspicious as hell of anyone who wants the cube, whatever side they say they’re on. Plus, he’s got no great love for spies since Tony told him about Bucky and the Winter Soldier, so he decides to go snooping.
Fury agrees to let Tony in on the interrogation. Tony’s been prepared enough, unsurprised enough, every time something big happened that he’s starting to suspect there’s a grain of truth somewhere in Tony’s wild stories about suddenly developing clairvoyant powers. And yet he doesn’t seem capable, or perhaps willing, to stop the disasters before they happen. He’s got an agenda, and Fury wants to know what it is, and he’ll let something slip to Loki.
Tony doesn’t want Fury to know about the Infinity Stones, not yet. Not until the Twins have been created because he knows they’ll need Wanda if they’re to have a hope of defeating Thanos in a pitched battle. It’s tricky to talk around them, but he’s spent a lifetime dealing with politicians. He’s good at plausible deniability.
He drops hints, edges as close to the truth as he dares, mentions jewels and titans and warlords, but Loki is a better liar than Tony will ever be, and he barely reacts. In the end, Tony can’t think of any way of making Loki reveal the Hulk plan without tipping his hand, so he leaves Natasha to do what she does best, and goes back to the lab to warn Bruce about what’s coming.
He gets back just as JARVIS finishes decrypting SHIELD’s files. It’s not exactly a surprise, but Banner’s pretty pissed off, and even Clint looks unhappy, though he doesn’t say anything.
Tony warns Bruce about the Hulk as best he can without alerting Clint, and then Fury arrives. He demands to know what the hell Stark’s playing at, hacking SHIELD, and why the hell he’s still keeping secrets when the safety of the entire planet’s on the line.
Steve arrives back then and confronts Fury about the weapons. Tony’s not letting himself be goaded this time, not when he knows it’s the sceptre fucking with them, so Fury has to deal with the combined anger of Bruce, Steve, and Tony. Natasha arriving to try to persuade Bruce to leave doesn’t do anything but escalate the situation.
Which is when Bobbi attacks.
She doesn’t have Clint’s marksmanship, but she’s one of the smartest people SHIELD has ever employed, and her attack is just as effective.
She takes out one of the engines. Steve and Tony go out to fix it, while in the lab Bruce fights back a transformation. He knew it was coming, he’d been braced for it, but it’s still a struggle to fight it back. He terrifies the life out of Natasha before he manages to get his heart rate back down.
Steve and Tony work to repair the engine, while Clint goes looking for Bobbi and her men.
Bruce and Natasha make for the bridge just as a plane piloted by one of Bobbi’s allies strafes it. Bruce throws himself in front of Natasha, taking three bullets to the chest, and even his control has its limits. He transforms, and Hulk throws himself out of the window, landing on the plane and sending it into a nosedive.
Bobbi’s people take out a second engine and the Helicarrier begins to lose altitude. Tony had been hoping maybe Bobbi would at least have a different plan, but there’s still no way to restart the engine getting inside the turbines. He manages to start it, but almost gets shredded by it before Steve can fight his way to the controls to slow it enough for Tony to get out.
Thor rushes to the cell where Loki is being held, but he’s too late. Bobbi’s already unlocked the door and when Thor makes a grab for an illusory Loki, Loki trips him into the cell and locks the door behind him.
Coulson tries to stop him, but Loki stabs him through the heart and hits the button to release the cage, sending Thor plummeting to earth.
Clint finally catches up to Bobbi as she’s leaving Loki’s cell. Realising she can’t be reasoned with, Clint settles for hitting her really hard in the head, hoping it will break Loki’s control, and miraculously, it does.
Fury shows them Coulson’s blood-stained trading cards. Tony never found out in the original timeline that Coulson was still alive, so as far as he knows, he’s just let a good man die for the second time. He tells Fury as much as he thinks he can, that Loki is going to New York, that Stark Tower is his target, and for once he doesn’t even care if he’s fucking up the future.
Bruce wakes up in a hole in the ground, and this time even his StarkPhone hasn’t survived. He’s got some emergency numbers memorised, and the caretaker of the building he landed on lets him use his phone to call Rhodey, who jokes that this is worryingly close to a tradition, but agrees to pick him up.
Clint is waiting by Bobbi’s bedside when she wakes up. He tries to apologise, but she points out he had no idea what was going to happen to her. As they’re talking, Natasha arrives and tells them Loki is headed to New York. Clint uncuffs Bobbi and gives her a gun, and the three of them leave together.
On the roof of Stark Tower, Selvig is constructing his portal machine. Tony already knows what will happen if he tries to breach the containment without the sceptre. He skips that step, and the banter with Loki. He’d sent evacuation warnings to every news channel JARVIS could get access to as soon as the battle on the Helicarrier ended. When he gets to New York he calls a replacement suit to him, and focusses on getting civilians out of the danger zone until the Chitauri start coming through.
Steve and the SHIELD agents arrive in a SHIELD quinjet. Steve jumps out immediately, while the others focus on air support until the jet gets shot down.
Rhodey and Bruce arrive as the Avengers regroup. Tony tells them what he can about fighting the Chitauri (although there’s not much to tell) and that Loki’s sceptre can penetrate the barrier.
Rhodey gives Clint a lift to a convenient rooftop, then he and Tony focus on thinning the numbers in the sky. Thor focuses on the new Chitauri coming through the portal, and Steve, Bobbi, Clint, and Natasha take out the drones on the ground. Hulk decides killing Leviathan is his new favourite hobby, and focusses on those.
Clint shoots an exploding arrow at Loki, knocking him off his Chitauri glider, and calls out over the comms that the sceptre is on the tower. Bobbi calls for a lift, and Tony picks her up and drops her on the top of the tower, just as the Hulk smashes into Loki.
The World Security Council overrides Fury's concerns and send a plane to nuke Manhattan. Fury calls Tony, who’d known this was coming, but had been hoping they might avoid it this time.
It’s a risk rather than a suicide mission this time, he’s been working on making the suits space-worthy since he arrived back in time, but it’s still terrifying.
He flies it through the portal, aims it at the mother-ship, and makes it back through just as Bobbi closes the portal.
They take Loki into custody, and then Tony insists they all go out for shawarma. It’s only happened once before, and he’s the only one who remembers it, but it’s still a tradition.
The next day, the Avengers gather in Central Park to say goodbye to Thor. Before they leave, he asks if Tony has any prophecies for him. Tony is trying to avoid wildcard changes, but he’s almost certain changes on Asgard won’t affect earth, and ultimately, even if he could, there’s some things he can’t let a friend suffer without at least trying to help. He doesn’t tell Thor much - he doesn’t know much - but he tells him that unless he changes something, Frigga will die when the palace is attacked.
Fury watches as the team separates. Steve back to his apartment, Bruce, Tony and Rhodey heading for the tower, and Natasha, Clint and Bobbi returning to SHIELD Headquarters. Maria Hill is skeptical, but Fury tells her he’s confident that they will assemble again the next time the world needs them.
Back at the tower, Tony says goodbye to Bruce, and walks into his lab. He locks the door and blacks out the glass walls sepperating it from the rest of the tower, and brings up the timeline JARVIS had created.
“Alright then. Time to change the future.”
Backdrops
Past Events
Follows the events of 2.3. Thor: Exile 2.1. Incredible Hulk and 2.2 Tony vs Hammer. Precedes 3.1. The Fall of HYDRA.
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Related Organizations
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