Pepper Potts returned to Stark Industries two days after Malibu ceased to exist as a home and became a government problem.
The building had never looked so clean, so expensive, or so useless. Glass still rose in the same confident lines, reception still ran on polished smiles and controlled panic, and assistants still moved at speed with tablets, coffee, and the sort of clipped politeness usually reserved for funerals, mergers, or both together.
Pepper stepped out of the lift in a dark suit that fit properly and slept badly. Her hair was under control. Her expression was under stricter control. The rest of her existed somewhere behind her ribs, still going over the blast, the collapse, the cold ocean air, and the moment Tony had sealed armour around her and thrown her clear while the house came apart around them.
No body had been recovered, and that was the problem, because bodies ended arguments.
Missing men with a history of surviving impossible nonsense created them.
She had spent the last forty-eight hours pushing every resource she could touch into the search. She arranged private teams, air sweeps and coastal scans, discreet enquiries through contacts who owed Stark favours and through some who merely owed Tony their pride. She had refused meeting requests from Maya Hansen and Aldrich Killian, both, not because either of them lacked persistence, but because persistence was cheap and Tony was missing. She even tried to reach Tony's newest friend to no avail. Even her contacts in government had no idea where Noctis was, and with the tension about the enhanced individuals, no one wanted to risk angering the vindictive gentleman with acquired tastes on revenge.
She dropped her bag, pulled the latest search report across the desk, and read it standing.
The wording was careful with no confirmation. No verified sighting. No conclusive debris trail. Possibility of offshore current displacement, inland movement or suit malfunction.
Nobody knew where he was.
An assistant tapped once and entered when Pepper called for her.
"Any updates from the search teams?"
The young woman shook her head. "Nothing usable since six thirty. We have two more firms asking whether they should widen inland coverage."
"Yes." Pepper did not sit. "Double the radius. Pull another private aviation contractor if you have to."
The assistant nodded and hesitated.
"Ms Potts, Dr Hansen has called four times."
"She can make it five."
"And Mr Killian asked again whether you would reconsider a meeting."
Pepper looked up from the report.
"Did he mention why I should care?"
The assistant glanced at the tablet in her hand.
"He said he may have access to a signal that matches Iron Man's suit."
That hit.
Pepper did not let it show beyond the slightest stilling in her shoulders.
"When did he say that?"
"Ten minutes ago."
Pepper set the report down very carefully.
She still did not trust Aldrich Killian. He was like a salesman who had mistaken old embarrassment for unfinished romance and then built a whole empire out of not getting over it. But if he truly had something tied to Tony's suit, then refusing the meeting was not an option.
She exhaled once.
"Set it up. Outside the office."
The assistant blinked. "Outside, ma'am?"
"Yes. I do not want him anywhere near this building."
Pepper reached for her phone. The assistant left at once.
She picked up the phone and stared at Tony's last unread message for three seconds before locking the screen again.
"When I find you," she murmured to the empty office, "I'm going to be furious first and relieved second."
--
SHIELD was conducting its own search for Tony Stark, though it had no illusions about the process being noble.
Nick Fury had learned his lesson the first time Stark vanished into hostile hands and nearly changed the geopolitical balance by becoming Iron Man. He did not want a repeat, especially not after New York, not after the nuclear order, and certainly not while the planet's collection of enhanced idiots was still rearranging the meaning of public power in front of cameras.
His office lights were low as paperwork always looked marginally less insulting in dimness.
Field summaries, search maps, political briefings, recovery projections, and some internal threat notes were on top next to the updates on public opinion following Lucius Noctis's latest decision to stop selling potions and publicly announce that he had no intention of helping with future crises if the reward was going to be moral lecturing from men who had spent the Battle of New York hiding behind committees.
That particular mess kept growing.
Fury read another overnight brief and rubbed one hand over his head. The public line was moving, slowly but measurably, away from the expected shape. The more certain politicians tried to frame the enhanced as dangerous assets needing tighter control, the more the footage from Manhattan kept coming back to ruin the pitch. Mutants pulling civilians out of rubble. Rogers in the streets, X-Men assisting triage, and Noctis, that vindictive bastard, healing people on camera and then turning the whole rescue debate into a referendum on state gratitude, hypocrisy, and experimental abuse.
Boynton had wanted a billing conversation. Instead, he had lit a fire under every person in the country who thought the people saving them might deserve better than an invoice.
That was becoming a problem.
Governments could posture all they liked, but the hard truth underneath the shouting was simple. They needed the enhanced. Mutants, mutates, improved humans, every category of problem and solution wrapped in flesh. If another Manhattan happened tomorrow, there were not enough trained conventional assets to contain it cleanly, and everybody in power knew it.
Which meant public hostility was becoming strategically expensive.
Fury leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for half a second.
"There are always too many damned things," he muttered.
The knock at the door came right on time, because inconvenience always kept office hours.
"Come in."
Maria Hill stepped through, closed the door behind her, and crossed to the desk with a folder in one hand. Her face gave away nothing except fatigue sharpened into usefulness.
"Divers found nothing around the Malibu site," she said. "No suit fragments beyond the initial field, no body, no secondary impact signature in the immediate radius. We're widening the search grid."
Fury took the folder and skimmed the summary.
"Keep widening it."
Hill gave one short nod.
"We also picked up three separate private search teams tied to Stark Industries. Potts is spending heavily and not waiting for official coordination."
"She's got the right instinct."
Hill waited.
Fury looked up.
"What?"
Her mouth shifted by a degree. "That almost sounded like praise."
"It wasn't. It was efficiency recognition."
That was enough of a joke for the room.
Hill left after getting the nod to continue, and Fury was alone again with the desk, the bad timing of the world, and the increasingly unavoidable conclusion that every idiot in Washington wanted certainty from people who were currently supplying him with paperwork instead of Stark.
He did not enjoy uncertainty. He enjoyed it even less when it was attached to a billionaire with trauma, armour, and a habit of finding trouble faster than most systems could log it.
Then there was Noctis.
Fury looked at another clipped report on public response to the potion suspension and read one line twice.
Support for Noctis's position continued trending upward in urban centres with high recent casualty exposure.
Nothing improved a selfish man's public standing like saving a city and then telling it to go to hell on principle.
Fury closed the file and set it aside before the irritation became productive enough to need furniture damage.
-
Hydra, unlike SHIELD, was having an excellent time recently.
Chaos suited it.
The fall of one city, the panic of several governments, the public uncertainty around heroes, mutants, and enhanced individuals, Stark missing, the Mandarin running wild long enough to soak up attention, all of it created breathing room, and breathing room was one of the few luxuries clandestine empires valued honestly.
In Sokovia, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker stood inside a secured chamber and watched the only survivors become data points he intended to weaponise.
The sceptre had reached him after New York, and unlike the people who treated alien artefacts as trophies, Strucker treated them as tools. Unstable tools, incompletely understood tools, and tools likely to kill most people brought near them, but tools all the same.
The bodies had piled up first, which was inevitable.
Men and women, volunteers and involunteers on paper and desperation on legs in reality, strapped into rigs, dosed, monitored, shocked, convulsed, broken and buried. The sceptre's energy did not negotiate with ordinary biology. Most subjects failed messily.
Two, however, survived.
Wanda Maximoff stood behind the reinforced glass in a plain grey facility dress, pale hands resting against her own forearms as if holding herself together by force of habit. Pietro sat on the examination table on the other side of the chamber line, bouncing one heel with the contained irritation of someone learning that stillness was often just boredom with better posture.
Brother and sister.
Mutants, as the files had finally been accepted with bureaucratic distaste.
The experiments had altered both.
Wanda had telekinesis and telepathic capabilities before, then something else layered under them, stranger, less stable, not merely mental force but a current that looked uncomfortably close to a force, only to be labelled as magic when it moved through the air. Pietro's natural speed had not been replaced; it magnified to an absurd degree. Measurements were still being argued by men in white coats who had started fearing their own tools.
Strucker preferred outcomes to wonder.
He watched Pietro blur from one end of the room to the other and stop with his hair barely disturbed.
"Again," Strucker said.
Pietro rolled his eyes and moved.
The tracking cameras lost him halfway through the run.
A technician murmured something about multiplicative enhancement values.
Strucker ignored the language and kept the result.
Wanda turned her head towards the sound of the sceptre in its containment cradle. Her eyes lingered there for a moment too long.
That interested him more than her silence.
There was intelligence in both of them. Resentment, too, a resentment that can and will be used to shape them into what Hydra needed.
Hydra had never needed the loyal. It had done perfectly well with the angry, provided their anger could be directed and fed.
He had no meaningful interest in Tony Stark's disappearance, the Mandarin panic cycle, or whatever new moral melodrama the world was now staging around their enhanced public assets. Pierce shared the same view. Let the noise spread. Let SHIELD and the politicians exhaust themselves playing reaction games while Hydra builds quietly.
Stark could stay missing. Terrorists could burn half the coast or none of it.
The useful question was whether the Maximoff pattern could be repeated.
Will more mutant siblings result in the same survival window and better control?
Everything else was unnecessary.
Strucker turned from the glass and addressed the lead scientist without lowering his voice.
"I want expanded screening on related candidates. Siblings first, genetic proximity has potential, and this is no longer a theory."
The man nodded at once.
"And Stark?" he asked carefully.
Strucker dismissed the name with a flick of his fingers.
"Let the Americans chase their missing toymaker. We are busy making better things."
-
Pepper's driver kept the route clean, direct, and quiet.
The restaurant Killian had chosen sat far enough to imply privacy and expensive enough to promise discretion, which meant every table inside had probably heard at least one career-ending sentence before dessert.
Pepper watched the city through the window as they moved.
Billboards had changed since New York. Storefronts had changed. People even walked differently now in some districts, as if the sky breaking over Manhattan had taught them to glance upward more often without quite knowing why.
The car slowed for a light. Then it moved again.
Pepper checked the time, checked the street, and ran through the meeting in her head. Killian would start charming, shift to insightful, test for emotional weakness, then present whatever signal or information he claimed to have as though it were a gift instead of leverage.
She had already decided she was not thanking him for anything unless Tony walked in alive behind the wine list.
She jolted wildly. The impact came from behind.
The car lurched forward so hard her shoulder drove into the door, and her phone flew from her hand. The driver swore, fought the wheel, and got half a word of warning out before the second hit came.
Metal screamed. Pepper's breath caught in her throat with the seat belt biting hard across her chest.
"Stay in the car," the driver snapped, already reaching for his door.
The order lasted less than two seconds.
Men were on them before he got out.
Pepper turned and saw one through the shattered rear glass. Exposed skin showed along his arms and face in burning, angry lines, red-orange under the night like heat trapped too close to the surface. Another tore the rear door wide with bare hands, metal folding back under strength no ordinary body should have had.
She went for the opposite latch, but another hand was already there. Hot fingers clamped around her arm. The heat was wrong, not skin temperature, not adrenaline, but something deeper and more dangerous, like grabbing a radiator that could make choices.
She kicked once, hard enough to connect with a knee. The man grunted, tightened his grip, and dragged her sideways out of the car.
The world narrowed into noise and motion.