Lucius took a slow breath as the Array of Convergence finished moving his new powers into a category that could no longer be affected by xenophobes.
The sacrifices had gone to dust. The runes had spent themselves. The cute little miracle was done. What remained was the aftertaste of power and the deeply satisfying knowledge that he had just got a not-so-secret facility in a very smug old universe in a single day.
He stood in the lab for a moment longer and let the new architecture of himself settle properly.
Phastos, Sersi, and Sprite remained with him on top of the standard Eternal package. Leech's power had now joined the inventory too, which gave him a clean nullification field to lay over mutant powers whenever he felt like ruining somebody's day in a more specialised manner. On top of that sat the other things he had already made his, teleportation, regeneration, invisibility, telekinesis, telepathy, and the rest of the gifts he had internalised so thoroughly they no longer answered to mutant suppression at all.
Then there were his own contributions, which, in his unbiased opinion, deserved the utmost respect above most supernatural accidents. He had arrived in this 'Marvel'ous universe with engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, ritual talent, and a healthy refusal to die quietly or morally. Powers were wonderful. His hard work and wise choices remained the superior art.
He lifted one hand, flexed the fingers, and enjoyed the simple fact that reality had become more negotiable yet again.
Then he turned his attention outward.
The facility servers were already his. He slipped through them with the easy confidence of a man walking around his own kitchen, took hold of the available satellite feeds, and pushed his sight south and west until New Mexico revealed before him in fragments of camera footage, military recordings, and stolen lines of sight.
-
Thor was walking towards the Destroyer.
The blond idiot had finally reached the portion of his life where pain, shame, exile, and repeated blunt-force lessons from Midgardians were apparently enough to qualify as character development. Good for him. Lucius watched him move through the dust and heat towards the towering Asgardian machine and felt all the warmth a man might reserve for a monkey trying to solve theology by walking into a furnace.
The challenge Odin had laid on him had done exactly what bad fathers always claimed discipline would do. It had not made Thor wiser. It had simply beaten him until he became acceptable to the enchantment.
The Allfather of Asgard, candidate for Worst Father of the Last Ten Millennia, was in his beauty sleep while all this happened.
Odin had already managed to create one civilisational calamity in the form of Hela, then followed it by raising Thor like a ceremonial battering ram and Loki like a problem to be managed by half-truths. Now he lay in the Odinsleep while his adopted son sold out Jotunheim, sent the Destroyer after his brother, and generally behaved like the sort of crazed manager who smiled while setting fire to the filing cabinets.
Lucius turned away from the live feed for a moment and let the larger shape of future Marvel stupidity line itself up in his head.
The old sacred arrangement, for all its filth, had at least been centralised. He Who Remains sat over it like a bored tyrant, trimming reality down to one shape he could survive. Then Sylvie killed him and split the whole structure open. The timelines multiplied, the careful little prison broke, and the multiverse stopped pretending it was under adult supervision.
That should have been the end of Loki's relevance. Instead, it became the opposite. After enough suffering to satisfy several playwrights and at least one deeply vindictive god, Loki ended up taking the burden on himself and holding the branches together from outside conventional time. It was almost poetic, but not inaccurate. Sylvie broke the cage. Loki became the connector.
That was where the future stopped being merely complicated and started becoming interesting.
Because once the structure loosened, once the old certainty of the Sacred Timeline split open, men who should never have been allowed to touch any universe at all suddenly got opportunities. That included Victor von Doom, refined tyrant, armour connoisseur, ruler, scientist, mage, and one of the few men in fiction with the proper instinct to wear a metal mask and still think himself the adult in every room. If the timelines had stayed under a single leash forever, many doors would have stayed closed. With Loki holding the branches instead of trimming them, those doors stopped being theoretical.
Lucius rather liked that.
It was one of several reasons he kept a decent relationship with Tony Stark.
Because one particular theory had enough elegance to keep scratching at the back of his mind.
The theory went like this. Victor von Doom had not been removed from the Sacred Timeline because he lacked genius, danger, or relevance. He had been neutralised because he possessed too much of all three. So He Who Remains, who had every reason to hate variables he could not reliably dominate, did the cleaner thing. He did not kill Doom. He rewrote his life, redirected the man completely, and turned the greatest threat into a different name with a different childhood and a far more photogenic ending. In that version of events, Tony Stark was not Howard's son in the simple, sentimental sense. He was Victor von Doom with the edges sanded, rebranded, Americanised, and pointed towards heroism because time required his mind, but could not survive his proper personality.
The theory became nastier the longer Lucius let it breathe.
If He Who Remains really needed time travel solved in exactly the way Stark solved it, and if Doom's intellect was the kind of intellect that would always eventually break chronology open, then redirecting that mind into Tony Stark made a revolting sort of sense. Remove the throne of Latveria. Remove the mother, the old scars, the iron, the proper bitterness, and drop the same level of intellect into a rich weapons heir with daddy issues and enough charisma to make self-destruction look like a public service. Then wait. Eventually, he would still crack time open. He would just do it wearing designer sunglasses instead of green steel.
Lucius smiled at the thought and did not bother pretending it was anything except a theory.
Still, it was a theory with teeth.
It would also explain why certain things in the Howard and Tony relationship always felt half a note off, even before the obvious emotional neglect. It would explain the stubborn intensity of the genius, the flair, the sheer insistence on building in directions a normal industrialist's son should not have been born staring towards. It would explain a lot, actually, which was either a mark in its favour or proof that fan theories, like cults, became more dangerous once the clever people joined in.
Regardless, Lucius liked Tony anyway.
He turned his attention back to the live situation in New Mexico and thought about Thor again.
There might be value in nudging him.
Rune King Thor was one of his favourite characters after all. That was not just a blond thug with electricity. That was an answer to questions most universes regretted asking out loud. The problem, quite apart from Thor being Thor, was Jane Foster. Lucius had no objection to attraction in the broad sense. He objected to the relentless insistence fiction had on pairing very powerful men with fragile mortals who proceeded to complicate everything through idealism, terminal illness, poor tactical judgment, or all three.
Thor was already halfway down that road the second he landed in the desert and let himself get emotionally leash-trained by a woman with a truck and a scientific grant application. It was not surprising. It was simply disappointing.
Then again, fiction had always loved that trick.
There was another example from a less shamelessly entertaining corner of the Cape economy. Some mysterious reporter with a square jaw and the physique of a carved cathedral wandered round in glasses and expected civilisation to accept that nobody could recognise him. That was the whole method. Glasses, not illusion, masks in the shapes of glasses, telepathy, or shape shifting. Glasses, and the world, in a display of astonishing cooperation with idiocy, apparently agreed.
Lucius, despite everything, had always liked that one.
Not the disguise. The disguise was an insult to public intelligence. The man underneath it, however, had been played by Henry Cavill, and there were times when sheer physical presentation obliged respect even if the script had clearly been written during an oxygen shortage. Lucius would mock the glasses until his dying day, or rather until one of his many possible non-deaths, but he was not blind. If a man were built like that, then obviously the audience would forgive the absurdity and move on.
That, in its own annoying way, was also educational.
Humanity would accept nearly any lie if the liar's face was arranged attractively enough. People loved Catwoman long before Hollywood decided the most important thing about her was Halle Berry's ass..ets. Definitely shocking. Turns out a complex, morally untethered woman with claws and an agenda is infinitely more interesting in a tight suit.
He scoffed once and shut the thought away.
Never mind. The point remained that gods with mortal attachments were a pattern, not a tragedy, and it was past time someone competent took a look at the internal structure of the Destroyer.
That machine interested him more than Thor's emotional life ever could.
The thing was Asgardian high craft, uru forged, obedient to royal command structure, and vicious enough to flatten everyone short of a properly restored Thor. Machines built by god-kings tended to hide useful principles in arrogance. Lucius had every intention of taking them apart mentally, and perhaps literally if the opportunity became entertaining enough.
He smiled, and the expression went mean in all the expected ways.
"Time to give the blondie a hand."
Then he disappeared.